Accessing Your Email
Basically, there are two main ways of accessing email, both with their own advantages and disadvantages: using a web-based interface, or downloading your email to your local computer and using an email client to access it.
Using a Web-Based Interface
In this case, you use your internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.) to go to a specific web page which displays your email, and allows you to perform common actions (reading, sending, deleting and replying to email, organizing email into folders etc.).
The main advantage of this method is that you can access your email from anywhere that you have access to the internet.
The main disadvantage of this method is that your email is only accessible when you're connected to the internet (so you can't read or compose email when you're offline).
Downloading Email to your Local Computer
There are various programs (see the Free Email Clients section) which can retrieve your email, download it to your local machine, and then provide a user interface for your to access it locally.
The main advantage of this method is that your email is retrieved from your email provider and stored locally on your computer, so it can be accessed when you're offline (you obviously can't access new email which hasn't yet been retrieved, but can access all of your existing email messages). You can also compose email while you're offline, which will be sent when you're connected to the internet again.
A second advantage is that the email programs which use this approach generally provide a more user-friendly interface than web-based solutions.
The main disadvantage of this method is that usually once a message has been downloaded to your computer, it's deleted from your email provider (because it's no longer required there). What this means is that your email is accessible on your local computer, but not from anywhere else. So, if you need access to your email from multiple different computers, then this is not a good approach for you.
POP3 and IMAP
There are two communications protocols which are widely used to allow these programs to retrieve your email – POP3 and IMAP. You don't need to know anything about how these work, but you may see an email provider stating that they do or don't provide POP3 access, so you should know that this is referring to the ability to download your email to your local machine and access it locally.
POP3 works well when you generally access your email from a single device. Typically, when you retrieve email via POP3, it's deleted from the server, so you can't later access it from somewhere else.
IMAP is a more sophisticated protocol, and is much more useful if you want to access your email from multiple devices. With IMAP, messages are typically left on the email server until they're explicitly deleted, so they can be accessed from multiple devices. IMAP also allows state information to be coordinated, so for example, if you read an email message on one device, it also shows as having been read on your other devices.
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