A general explanation of how to access your Ideanode mail accounts, the difference between POP and IMAP, and how to fight spam.

Webmail

Webmail is accessing your mail in a web browser, like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail. If this is the way you prefer to read your mail, great! Just head on over to:

http://webmail.commotionpromotion.com

and you’re good to go.

Desktop Mail clients

Desktop mail programs, like Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail or Eudora allow you to access your mail on your computer. Desktop mail clients offer a richer experience than web mail—you can drag and drop files from your desktop, and search and sort your mail faster.

Which Desktop Client should I use?

Well, we think that you should use whichever program you’re familiar and can be productive in. We tend to focus on for Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird, but any modern mail client will work and we’ll happily help you troubleshoot any problems you may encounter.

If you’re an OS X user and haven’t used a desktop mail program before and are looking for advice, we recommend Apple’s own Mail. It comes bundled with OS X, and we think that it’s got the typical polish and friendliness of an Apple application.

If you’re a Windows user looking for advice, we recommend Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s an open-source mail client that we consider one of the best out there.

With a desktop mail client, you can retrieve your mail in one of two ways:

POP

POP is the simplest way of getting your mail. When you connect with your desktop client, it downloads the mail to the hard drive and removes it from the server. The advantage to this is that you typically don’t have to watch the usage of your mailbox very closely. The disadvantage is that all of your mail is stored in one machine, on one client.

IMAP

IMAP is a protocol for storing your mail on the server, rather than downloading the only copy to your hard drive. The advantage to this is that you can access your mail from different mail clients. You could, for instance, check your mail with Outlook at home, and when you’re at work during the day use Webmail. You’d have the same folders and saved messages in both clients. The disadvantage to IMAP is that you have a limited amount of storage space on the server for your Inbox and shared folders, so you do need to watch your usage. (You can check this in Control)

General rules of thumb:

• If you use Outlook 2000 or earlier on a laptop where you sometimes use your mail without being connected to the network, use POP. (or upgrade to Outlook 2003)
• If you just use your mail in one client on one computer, use POP
• If you want to use your mail in multiple places, use IMAP

Spam

We use SpamAssassin to analyze incoming mail. If the system recognizes the message as spam, it modifies the Subject line of your message.

Make sure to check the Spam support articles for client-specific settings.
Anti-virus

We scan all incoming email for viruses, and if we find one we safely move your mail out of the way so that you can’t get infected. We’re currently updating Control so that you can configure what to do with these discarded emails.