pepsithepoodle said:
how do I access my outlook e-mail away from my home computer
Use the webmail interface to your e-mail account. With your web
browser, navigate to their webmail page.
Of course, being "away" does not mention if you will be using someone
else's computer or if you are taking a laptop with you (and if that is
your normal host or you have a desktop at home and the laptop is a
secondary host). If you don't want to use the webmail interface for
your e-mail (because of the lack of features), look into remote access
to your home desktop using something like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
already built into Windows XP and beyond, VNC variations like UltraVNC
or TightVNC, or use a 3rd party service for tracking your IP address and
setting up the connection, like
http://www.logmein.com or
http://www.teamviewer.com.
RDP will require you enable port 3389 through your software and router
firewall's (or through your software firewall and use port forwarding on
your router but that might mean using a static IP address for your
desktop so the router knows to where to connect if it doesn't port
forward on MAC address and only on IP address). VNC will also need you
to punch a hole through your firewalls and setup port forwarding.
You'll need to know what is the WAN-side IP address of your router that
was assigned by your IP to it, and that could change. You could use
DynDNS or No-IP to give your host an IP name, like myhost.dyndns.org,
and run their client on your desktop. With VNC, you'll be running their
server on your desktop to which you connect from the outside.
LogMeIn and TeamViewer are easy to setup. LogMeIn is more oriented to
someone that wants remote access to their own host. TeamViewer is
oriented to someone inviting you to connect and control their host to
fix it, but it can be setup as a server to allow you to remote connect
to your home desktop. LogMeIn and TeamViewer are free for personal use,
not for business use. LogMeIn is a bit faster on screen updates than
TeamViewer because LogMeIn includes a video mirror driver (as does
UltraVNC) that helps in the compression of the traffic data for screen
updates; however, if you have a high-speed connection, the video mirror
driver won't help speed up the screen updates, and since it can cause
conflicts then don't bother installing it.
