Definitions: POP = Post Office Protocol = a connection from the client on your PC (Outlook or Outlook Express)
SMTP = Simple Mail Transport Protocol = the format of messages.

The bottom line is that regardless of your ISP provider, you can use the popular GMAIL as a repository for email, and manage it from a web interface or from your PC client software.  (My ISP also has this functionality, but there are a few ISP's that do not have this capability, and only provide one or the other.)  The other feature for an ISP is access from outside your area code, which was to be the subject of Monday's meeting.

Another "for instance", Yahoo mail is an additional charge to merge your yahoo mail with other POP servers.
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Gmail outage - but not for Outlook users
Saul Hansell at the New York Times is reporting on an outage on the popular Gmail service.
The Gmail breakdown happened at the start of the working day in Europe and lasted until about lunchtime. Early risers in the USA might have noticed the problem too.

What’s interesting to us is that the problem seemed to be with the Gmail web interface – the underlying email technologies were reportedly working fine.

That means Outlook users who connect to Gmail via IMAP or POP/SMTP could continue using their email, bypassing or even unaware of the problems Google was having.

You can receive/send email from Gmail into many email clients including Outlook using POP/SMTP. Google has instructions for Outlook 2007, Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2002 (XP) – the latter can be applied to earlier versions of Outlook too.

For a full synchronization of Gmail folders with Outlook, choose the IMAP option. Google has instructions for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003.

Another choice is to forward Gmail messages to another account which can then be imported into Outlook.
It’s not clear what happened to Gmail users using a browser with the new offline service option. At worst there browsers where ‘offline’ – no new messages arrived and outgoing messages where held until a connection could be established.

We like Gmail a lot but it’s best not to rely on it alone – this event has highlighted the wisdom of having alternative methods of accessing your email, whomever hosts it.

See a version of this article on the Office-Watch.com web site click here for more or mobile edition