Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
There are various options to access one email account from multiple computers, and there are pros and cons to each.
I run a desktop PC with Windows XP and also a Laptop with Windows Vista. They both have the same email address as my husband and I share this. When the PC is switched on the emails come into that one, but when the laptop is on, they come into that one if the PC is switched off. Is there any easy way to transfer emails from the laptop to the PC without having to set up a new email address, or sending each individual email to myself?
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I get variations of this question a lot.
There are a lot of misunderstandings of exactly what email is, where it lives, and what it means to have an email address. Clearing up some of that should help you understand what's happening here, and also help you decide how you want to handle it.
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Where Email Comes From
Email comes from everywhere, of course - all of your correspondents, and potentially all over the globe.
When they send you email, it is placed in a central location provided by your email service provider.
If your email address is, for example, @hotmail.com then that mail server is run by the folks at Microsoft who own Hotmail. If you're @gmail.com then it's Google. If your email address is provided by your ISP then it's their server. You get the idea - email that is destined for you is collected on a server that's run by your email provider.
When you get your email, that's where it comes from.
Where Email Goes
So, what happens when you read your email?
There are two approaches: web-based and PC-based (desktop or laptop; "PC" or Mac or whatever else).
Web-based Email Access
With web-based email the email goes nowhere - you use a web browser to access and read the email directly from the email service's mail server:
The email never leaves the server, and remains stored there. Your inbox, folders and whatever else you choose to keep as part of your email, including perhaps even your contacts, is all kept on that server.
The convenience, of course, is that you can access it from any computer at any time, as long as you can connect to the internet and login to your account.
Among the downsides is the fact that it requires an active internet connection to read your email, and you're subject to the speed of that connection. Also, if you lose access to your account you lose access to everything, perhaps forever in the case of most free accounts.
PC Email Access
With a PC email program you actually move your email from the server to your own PC when you download your email:
Once downloaded the email resides on your machine ... only.
Since it's on your machine you'll need to make sure you're backing up properly, of course, so as not to lose everything should your hard disk die. You should be doing that for more than just your email anyway, so this shouldn't be an extra step.
The benefit is that it's on your machine, you can do with it what you will, it's typically faster to access, edit, change, and there's no real storage limit other than the size of your own hard disk. And you don't have to be connected to the internet to read it.
The downside is that it's on your PC and only your PC. You need access to that PC to deal with it.
One Email - Multiple Places
So what we struggle with is how best to access the same email from more than one PC.
As you've seen when you have more than once PC configured to simply download email, then each gets only that email that arrived on the email server since the last time the other PC downloaded email. In other words, each PC gets some, but not all, of your email.
One solution is, of course, move to a web-based email model. That way your email is never downloaded, and it doesn't matter what computer you're on to access it. While the major free services like Gmail come to mind, it's also quite possible that your existing email service provider also already provides some form of web-based email access. If you can live with the restrictions, it might be a viable choice.
Let's assume it's not.
Let's assume you want to download your email to your PC.
Leave On Server
Most PC email programs allow you in an advanced configuration to specify that messages should be left on the server. Using this is perhaps the most common approach to dealing with this scenario.
What this means is that rather than moving email messages from the server as we did above, your email program copies them.
After you "download" your email the email remains on the server as well. Your email program keeps track of what has and hasn't been downloaded, so you don't get everything each time.
And if you have two PC's that are configured to do this, they will both get all of the email. Or you could download to a single PC, but use a web-based interface to continue to access the server's copies.
There are drawbacks:
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By leaving the email on the server you're subject to any size limitations or "quota" of your email service provider. If your server's inbox exceeds that size subsequent email to you may not be delivered at all. Making space typically requires using the service's web interface to delete mails.
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If you re-install your email program it may lose track of what has and has not been downloaded - at which point everything will be.
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Sent email is kept only on the PC that it was sent from, or the web interface's sent mail folder if the web interface was used.
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Your contact list or address book is typically not duplicated. Each PC's address book is separate as is any address book maintained in the web interface.
A variant of this solution has one PC being the "master" email PC, which does not have "leave on server" configured - it truly downloads all email by moving it to the PC. Other PC's or devices could then be configured with "leave on server" to access email which has not yet been downloaded by the master. This is actually a common technique used for mobile devices accessing email.
Regardless, and as before, if you can live within these limitations, "leave on server" might be part of a workable solution.
Free Email
Another somewhat common approach is to automatically forward a copy of your incoming email to a free email account.
Configure a single PC to download email as normal, but have your email provider configured to forward a copy of all incoming email to another email address - probably a free account from Gmail, Hotmail or others. This allows you to access your email from your primary desktop, as before, but also from a separate account which you can once again choose to access from the web, or download to a second PC. In either case, both will get all messages.
IMAP
IMAP is an alternative access mechanism to POP3.
POP3 is the email protocol that is actually used to download email from your email server to your PC's email program.
IMAP protocol is best described as a kind of hybrid between web access and PC-based access. Email is downloaded as you read it, and statuses like "read" and "deleted" are automatically reflected in both places: server and PC. In fact, multiple PCs can access the same email on the server and "see it" all in a semi coordinated fashion.
To me it's some of the best features of web based email - single storage, access from multiple places - combined with some of the worst - connection assumed or required, server-side storage limits and so on.
That being said, POP3 and IMAP and web-based access can all be combined, and it may well be worth learning more about and looking into IMAP as part of the solution.
(Caveat: my direct experience with IMAP is limited. I invite those with more experience to leave a comment on the pros and cons.)
Whose Email Is It, Anyway?
One comment in your question leads me to this closing thought.
As we've seen "machines" don't have email addresses. You can choose to access email from a particular machine, but that doesn't really tie it to that machine in any meaningful way other than that access.
People have email addresses.
Now, it's not that uncommon for some folks to share an email address, however you can guess what I'm leading up to.
You may just want to consider separate email addresses, and sharing (by forwarding) those emails that make sense to share.
Just a thought. I know my wife doesn't want to see 90% of my email, and vice
versa. 
Article C4431 - September 1, 2010
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
To make matters more complex, maybe a tool like "POP Peeper" can be useful. It can automatically download emails from a net based account (e.g. Yahoo, hotmail and so on)onto your own PC and keep a copy there. It can even handle multiple accounts.
Posted by: Tokyo at September 8, 2010 4:49 AMThis issue was a challenge when my wife asked how to sync Outlook email folders between the laptop (Outlook 2003) on the first floor and the primary desktop (Outlook 2007) PC on the second floor. Rather than syncing up the pst files between both machines, it was easier to use Remote Desktop Connection from the laptop (Vista) and connect to the desktop machine (XP). Since you can save the configuration parameters and save it to the desktop, my wife now runs it without thinking about it. The other advantage is that she can also minimize the remote connection Window on the laptop and run local programs without closing the remote connection.
Posted by: Ken at September 9, 2010 6:30 AMI found using IMAP is the best solution. Your email is automatically synchronized with all the email clients you use... And you can mix and match email clients as you like... i.e. use both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2010 to access your email.
I tried the Dropbox approach too, but there are technical problems with that... just search on the dropbox forum and you will see...
To set this up I got an easy to follow guide from www.Easy-Email.net and it did not take me long to get working...
Once working you don't have to do anything else...
Worked a treat for me... hope this will help other people too... It's a major pain when it is not working right...
Posted by: James Hansson at September 12, 2010 10:30 AMI am curious why there is not a browser equivalent to web-based vs PC-based email? I am envisioning a very simple browser on the PC which downloads only simple images (or whatever) from the web-based browser site (i.e. insert a middle man between the HTML web content and my PC).
Posted by: Douglas Johnson at September 25, 2010 1:09 PMHere where truely simple eMail clients like Thunderbird shine.
(1) The problem of the Sent eMails being only in the computer from which they were sent can be solved as follows. Because Thunderbird's file system is very simple, you can selectively copy eMails across machines!! You can create a folder called, for example, "Shuttle", and move all recently sent eMail to it. (You sort the Sent folder to descending order by date then select only the eMails you sent that you need to have in the other computer.
Now copy that folder's associated files (Shuttle and Shuttle.msf) to the receiving machine (using the network, a diskette, or even a CD). When you start Thunderbird in the receiving machine, you will automatically see a "Shuttle" folder and you can move every eMail in it to that machine's Sent folder.
Back in the original machine, you can now move everything in "Shuttle" back to the Sent folder.
Another great feature in Thunderbird simplifies the above: you can tell it where you want it to put its files. Yes, create you own profile and tell it to put its data in a really easy to find directory, like "Thunderbird data", right off a drive's root.
(2) The matter of space on the server can be handled by telling Thunderbird just for how long to "leave files on server". If both machines are used every day, you can tell Thunderbird to leave them on the server for just one day.
(3) If the machines are in anyway connected, you can also very simply synchronize them by just copying the entire directory where you told Thunderbird to put its data across machines. But be sure Thundebird is NOT running on either machine. (If both access the Internet thru a router, the machines ARE connected and can exchange files.) DON'T DO THIS UNLESS THE receiving machine does not have anything the sending machine doesn't, like a recently sent eMail.
Posted by: Carlos Coquet at October 12, 2010 3:32 AM