Specifications

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11 E-Mail -- Mail at the Speed of Light
E-mail accounts fall into three broad categories; ISP account, browser based free mail and accounts on your
own domain. ISPs typically offer one or more email accounts to subscribers. This is convenient but ties
your e-mail address to your current ISP. Change ISP and your e-mail addresses changes. Free mail services
like Yahoo are advertising supported. They decouple your e-mail address from your ISP. Free accounts
make sense for personal use. Even though they are advertising supported the advertising is not overly
intrusive. These accounts use a web browser interface. They have the advantage of being accessible from
any computer. For business purposes or to insure long lasting email address nothing beats registering your
own domain name. Once you have a domain name mail is addressed to [e-mail]. If you
change the hosting service you simply transfer your domain to the new provider, your mail address stays
the same.
Antispam tip: With your own domain you can create as many user names as you want. This comes
in handy for sites that force you to register. You can create a unique name for each site so you can
track how they use and abuse the information you released.
11.1 Browser based Mail
Web based mail eliminates the need for specialized mail clients. You can access mail from any browser
equipped PC. The user interface is less convenient then a mail client but is very useful for casual use.
11.2 Mail Client
Except for browser-based mail, e-mail has a sending component, SMTP, and a mailbox part POP. When
you send e-mail your mail program connects to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) mail server.
The SMTP server acts as a relay between your e-mail client and the Internet. The SMTP server verifies that
each recipient is accessible and returns an error message if not. Incoming mail is delivered to the POP
server, (Post Office Protocol) maintained by the ISP. It works much as a post office box. Mail is stored
temporally until you have a chance to retrieve it. The e-mail program connects to the POP sever and
downloads mail. Normally the mail client requests the server to delete mail once it is transferred but this
can be overridden so mail remains on the server. This is convenient if you access mail from more then one
machine.
11.3 Corporate Mail
Telecommuters need to be able to access corporate mail when out of the office. Depending on where the
mail server is located this may prove to be difficult. If access to the mail server is not restricted the user
logs in like any other POP account. If the mail server is not publicly accessible then you need to connect
using a VPN client.
In our case connecting to the VPN required additional authentication and the connection was expired
periodically to increase security. This is not a problem when traveling and connecting for a short time but it
gets tedious as a telecommuter. A solution to this problem, if it is acceptable to your administrator, is to set
up your corporate mail account to automatically forward all incoming business mail to one of your personal
mail accounts. This allows you to access your corporate mail without activating the VPN.
11.4 SPAM Mitigation
The lack of SMTP security is the cause of many problems. Unlike POP, typical SMTP configuration does
not require authentication. This means it will cheerfully forward any mail presented to it. This has proven a
boon to mass mailers to inundate users with Spam. ISPs have adopted a number of strategies to minimize
the problem. This makes choosing the optimum mail configuration difficult, especially when using a
laptop that connects via different ISPs or to manage multiple mail accounts.