access to email

[Biscuit]

Hi

This may seem a pretty daft question but can I download my emails to two different locations. I currently have a laptop and a central computer. the central computer downloads all my emails into outlook so I have contact, etc that I can use. If I want to log on to my emails whilst on my laptop I have to use btconnect website and it only shows the recent ones, or ones not on the central computer. Now we are wireless I am less and less on the central computer which is ancient and slow too. Is there a way to get these emails on my laptop. I will continue to need them on my main computer too in case I need to print them out, as I do not know how to get my laptop to connect to the printer.

Can any one advise?

Regards

Paula

[SparkOut]

In Outlook (you mentioned - this works for version 2003, may vary slightly for other versions) go to Tools and Email Accounts. Choose "View or change existing email accounts). Click the "Change" button. Click the "More Settings" button. Click the "Advanced" tab at the top right. Under "Delivery" at the bottom of that page, tick the box that says "leave a copy of messages on the server".
That means that when you download the messages, it will not remove them from the server, so that you will still be able to get them on the other machine. If you set up Outlook on the other machine identically, you will be able to get a copy on both. You don't need Outlook necessarily on the laptop - Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc etc will all have a setting that you can use to leave the messages on the server as well as downloading them.
You may find that leaving the messages on the server permanently will mean that your mailbox fills up to the limit of space that BT give you, so you will have to go online from time to time and delete the older messages in the web view. Alternatively, just below the tickbox that says "leave a copy of messages on the server" you could also tick the "remove from server after xx days" box and have it automatically remove old messages, depending on how many messages you get in any given period.
If you want some more fancy synchronisation where you can also get a copy of your sent messages on both machines then you can do that too, but that will require either a different email account (such as googlemail) and/or a setup known as IMAP (rather than POP or POP3, which is no doubt what you will have at the moment) and probably best left for another lesson.

[Biscuit]

Thanks a lot

when i got my central computer it already had outlook on and I have no clue where the disk is as it predates me moving here 6 years ago. can you get it as a free download from microsoft or do I have to buy it again, or is there similar software that is a free download?

Regards
Paula

[SparkOut]

Outlook is not free, no. If you managed to find the disk that came with your original computer, it would still not legally be permissible to install it on another machine without having a new licence covering it.
However, EVERY Windows machine (up to Vista for sure - don't know about Windows 7 yet, but that's not an issue right now) has a built in email client, Outlook Express up to XP, and Windows Mail for Vista. You can set those up in a very similar way to Outlook. You get address books and contact info, but not the calendar functions.
You can also download Thunderbird which is a free alternative (provided by Mozilla, the same source as Firefox - the internet browser that provides the most competition for Microsoft). There's a few other options too, but one of these is enough for you to do what you need.

[giraffe]

I have btconnect and I can access the emails on the PC or the laptop, but we use btconnect on both. I recently got an email from them saying my inbox was full, but it did have over 300 undeleted emails in it (It's btbusiness broadband)