Summary. If you are using an email client (software program) to access your email messages such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, or Thunderbird, it is helpful to leave email messages on your email server if you are accessing email from two different computers or if you intend to be on vacation or otherwise away from home or work (leaving your desktop computer behind). In this way you can access your messages using a web interface on a shared public computer. Some people have a computer at work and a computer at home, and would like to access their email messages from both. Whether an email client is on one or both, you’ll want to set the configuration to save the messages.
Instructions. Follow these instructions to configure your messages to remain on the server:
- From the Tools menu choose Account Settings.
- For Server Settings, in the Server Settings box/grouping, choose to leave messages on server for at most 7 days. Adjust the number of days as needed.
Tips and Considerations. Here are some tips and considerations.
- With services such as Google, some people prefer to leave the messages on the server indefinitely, and manually remove the ones they don’t intend to save.
- Don’t choose too many days if your server has a size storage limit – particularly if you aren’t getting on the server regularly to clear off some files. If you get too many really large files (movies, pictures, audio files) as attachments in email messages, your server space will fill up and you’ll be unable to get any more messages. People writing you will receive a message stating that your email quota is full (the storage space on the server) and you’ll manually need to go in and remove messages.
- If you’ve already run into a storage capacity problem on the server, you can download the messages and choose to remove them from the server to automatically clear out the server. This is much easier than manually trying to go through and delete hundreds of messages. Be sure to backup your own computer to ensure that you don’t lose these email messages since they will now only be located on your local computer.