The life of a road warrior is much easier today than it was in the "Dark Ages" of mobile computing, 5–10 years ago. Back then, a mobile professional had to have arms like Hercules to lug around a laptop weighing 10 lbs. or more. He or she had to carry around a spider's nest of cables, and a host of spare batteries. Much of the time, you were only as mobile as the nearest electrical outlet and phone jack, and you were lucky to get about 9,600 bps throughput on the best connection. But fortunately, that speed was OK for our most important mobile application—e-mail.
We've come a long way in the last decade. We now have six-ounce handhelds, mobile landline connect speeds up to 56 Kbps, and wireless data communications. But e-mail remains our most important application.
In fact, more questions about e-mail are posted on the newsgroups than
on any other topic except synchronization.
If you need to interact with your corporate e-mail account while on the road, the Pocket PC's Inbox application lets you do it in 2 ways: POP3
and IMAP4. These acronyms refer to the different e-mail protocols Inbox
can use.
POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) is the e-mail protocol that most Internet Service Providers use. It is simple to operate, but all e-mail is kept on the local machine (your Handheld or Pocket PC). You can create folders on your Pocket PC, but you can't access any folders you have on your corporate desktop PC.
IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol 4) is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. This lets you interact with your corporate e-mail server from a remote location. You can send and receive e-mail, and move or copy messages in your corporate mailbox. With IMAP4, you have the same access to your corporate e-mail account as you would sitting at your desktop PC (but with a little less speed). Most corporate e-mail servers allow both POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. Check with your e-mail administrator to get set up.
Many users don't necessarily have the traditional corporate e-mail but use an Internet Service Provider, (ISP) such as AOL, MSN or a local ISP, for connecting to the Internet and sending and receiving e-mail.
Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and more
If you get your e-mail from Yahoo, America Online (AOL), Microsoft Network (MSN), or other such services, you can access it with your Pocket PC. Here's what you need to do.
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