Let's face it: E-mail is the number one use for a personal computer. Lots of us spend hours each day dealing with the dozens, even hundreds, of messages we receive. What makes it worse is that messages arrive through multiple accounts. If you're like me, you have an e-mail address for work, another for your home PC, one or more free Web-based e-mail accounts, an America Online e-mail address, and perhaps others.

Wouldn't it be great if you could grab all that mail with the click of a single button? Actually, you can. Most e-mail programs support multiple e-mail accounts and let you send and receive from them individually, or all at once. And more and more e-mail services support the standard POP3, SMTP, and IMAP mail transport protocols that let your e-mail program communicate with mail servers.

POP3 is the lingua franca of incoming e-mail. Regardless of the major e-mail program you use, you can almost always add another POP3 account in a jiffy. All you need to know is the POP3 server domain name or IP address of your ISP or e-mail service; your log-in name; and your password. The server's address is frequently something similar to "mail. ispname.com" or "pop. ispname.com," in which ispname is the service's domain name.

Outgoing mail is sent to an SMTP server (for example, "smtp. ispname.com"), usually located at the same address as the incoming mail server. IMAP mail servers work about the same--you need to know the mail server's address, your log-in name, and your password, as well as the information described above for the outgoing SMTP server.

To add a mail account to Outlook 2002 (the version that comes with Office XP), choose Tools, E-mail Accounts, select Add a new e-mail account, click Next, select the type of e-mail server, and click Next again (see FIGURE 1). Fill in the user and server information and click Next to finish.

In Outlook Express 6, choose Tools, Accounts, click Add, Mail, and enter the user and server information in the wizard that pops up. In Netscape Mail 6.2, choose Edit, Mail & Newsgroup Account Settings, then click the New Account button and answer the queries of the resulting wizard. In Eudora 5.1, choose Tools, Personalities, right-click the Personalities window at the left side of the screen, choose New, and then fill in the account information in the subsequent wizard screens.

There's Always a Catch

Now that I've explained the basics, here's the rub: You may not be able to get all your e-mail accounts funneled nicely into one e-mail program, and in one case, you'll have to agree to receive spam.

When AOL purchased Netscape, Netscape Mail suddenly learned how to send and receive AOL mail. If you followed the instructions above to configure Netscape Mail 6.2 to check your AOL account, you may have noticed that the server address is imap.mail.aol.com. Don't bother trying to plug that address into Outlook Express or Eudora--it won't work.

AOL's servers don't comply with the IMAP standard, and Netscape Mail is the only e-mail program (other than AOL's own software) that knows how to talk to those servers. If you're determined to get AOL mail in Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, or an older version of Netscape Communicator, check out ENetBot's $20 ENetBot Mail agent (see FIGURE 2).

Similarly, Microsoft Passport's Hotmail service seems to work only with that company's own e-mail programs. If you want to send and receive Hotmail messages using Eudora or Netscape Mail, you'll need another $20 add-on mail agent called Pop3Hot. Visit our Downloads library to download 30-day demo versions of both ENetBot Mail and Pop3Hot.

Yahoo Mail lets you send and receive mail using its standard POP3 and SMTP servers (pop.mail.yahoo.com and smtp.mail.yahoo.com, respectively), but it won't work until you sign up for the Yahoo Delivers targeted-marketing (spam) service. To enable the "service," click the Options link after logging in to Yahoo Mail, and then choose the link labeled POP Access & Forwarding.

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