Collecting your POP3 and Webmail Accounts into Outlook – Part 1 – Introduction and Considerations

Did you know that you can collect all of your various webmail, html, and POP3 email accounts into Outlook?  As of the date of this writing, I have over 40 POP3 accounts and a hotmail and msn account feed into my permanent Outlook account, making it easy for me to save attachments in appropriate client folders on my hard drive, keep my external accounts clean, and facilitate archiving (which will be another important topic for a later post).

Outlook v. Outlook Express

If you’re like me, you probably live in Outlook.  I prefer even older versions of Outlook to Outlook Express, simply because Outlook Express does not have much of the important functionality of Outlook.  Outlook Express makes a lot of simple tasks a whole lot harder than it oughta be and some tasks, such as rules, automatic archiving, and junk mail filters, virtually impossible.

Important Initial Considerations

There are a couple of important considerations to address before rushing out to become uber-organized.

  • Is this a work machine?
  • Does this machine/PC belong to you or your company?
  • Do you have enough hard disk space to handle the size of large and possibly multiple data and archive *.pst files?
  • Does your work require you to separate your personal and work emails for discovey and/or legal reasons (such as attorney/client privilege, government, financial)?
  • Do you require traveling access to your emails?

We’ll address the above considerations here:

Work PC’s and PC Ownership

Work machines that are owned by a business and not you, have a couple of challenges.  First, if your company has a policy of reviewing content on your work PC, then you may find your personal information contained in your personal emails available to everyone with the appropriate security authorization.  Second, if your employment terminates, then all messages and attachments stored on your work machine, both current and archived, will be be available to your ex-employer.

However, some individuals have more than just the company email accounts that are used for work.  For example, in addition to your work business account you have an additional hotmail or google free account that you use to sign up for continuing education, resource purchases, and any other area that would generate spam.  These free accounts also allow you to access them after you change employment and still maintain business contacts and business networks after you move.  It is important that you use these accounts responsibly.  It is also important that you have access to these accounts away from your work site.  You may want to attach this type of account to both your work and personal Outlook accounts.  This makes it possible to sync you contacts and calendar both at home and at work.  Note that Yahoo does not allow for Outlook syncing with their free accounts — only with their premium accounts.

On the other hand, if you own the PC you use for both work and personal, such as a laptop that is your main PC, then you’ve only to clear the remaining considerations.

Does the machine you want to use have sufficient hard disk space?

Because of the heavy business use for email these days, it’s not unreasonable for files or attachments up to 12mb to be passed back and forth numerous times.  Each time an email attachment is round-tripped (sent back and forth between email accounts) that attachment is saved within Outlook.  You can see that your Outlook data file could become gigantic in a short amount of time (thus the need for archiving).

My current Outlook data file (*.pst), even taking into consideration that I auto archive monthly, is over 164mb.  Each archive file is about 1/2 a gigabyte and I have 4 archive files.  That will definitely eat into an 80gb laptop hard drive!

Does your profession require separate types of email accounts, such as personal and professional?

Our government can serve as a valuable case study in how not to store and disseminate electronic information.  During discovery there were so many mixed type email messages that it was difficult to distinguish which of our elected officials’ email messages were personal, personal business, or public.

A good rule of thumb would be if your company gets sued, are your business and personal emails organized in such a way that your description of your last date or drug abuse is not “discovered” and posted on MySpace or FaceBook during the course of litigation.  While separating business from personal accounts is always the best practice, sometimes it’s not always possible.  I’ll generate an additional blog on organizing emails at a later date.

Do you need to access all of your emails on the go?

There are quite a few great products out there that will allow you to access all of your email accounts via logging into a permanent home or work machine.  If your company doesn’t have vpn, there are other great products out there that facilitate mobile workers.  I’ll touch on a few later in a separate blog. 

If you have trouble understanding technology, and if you prefer to opt for simplicity, then funneling your accounts into 1 Outlook account may not be the solution for you.  However, you can still save your POP accounts within Outlook and also leave messages on your server.  Unfortunately, this creates double the work since you have to deal with the messages within Outlook as well as on your POP server.  Some html accounts, such a MSN and Hotmail, allow for syncronizing accounts so that any you haven’t handled in Outlook are still available on the internet.  This can be a good news, bad news scenario, however.  If you’re like me, and follow a good electronic business process, then I file my emails and responses within the appropriate client or personal folders located with Outlook, which are stored on my hard drive, and thus not accessible from the internet hotmail or msn account.

This is the end of Part 1.  Look for Part 2.