MailRelayer

Technical explanation of how MailRelayer™ works

When people send you email, it is not delivered directly to your PC. Rather it is delivered to an email server where it sits until your email client goes and gets it. (There are no email carriers to bring it to your door; you have to go to the e-Post Office, as it were, and collect your letters from an e-mailbox.)

Normally your email program (be it Eudora, Outlook, Pegasus, or whatever) will connect to your email server every few minutes and download any new messages.

There are two standard procedures (or protocols) for collecting the mail: POP and IMAP. Most people use POP. IMAP is a newer protocol that does a lot more.

What MailRelayer does is turn your own PC into an email server. But instead of acting just as a staging point for new messages, it serves up all your accumulated email. Gigabytes and gigabytes in some cases. And MailRelayer does this using one of the same Internet-standard protocols, namely IMAP. Which means that all you need to read it is an IMAP client program or a suitable Web site.

Now, you might ask, "Could this not be dangerous?" Is there not a risk in opening my PC to the outside world?

Well there is always a tiny risk inherent in doing so but it’s truly very small and a negligible price to pay for the benefits.

Let’s look at why. First, MailRelayer makes your email and only your email remotely accessible. There is no way that even the most determined miscreant could use MailRelayer to read anything else stored on your computer.

Second, access to MailRelayer is password-protected. And your password is normally not sent across the Internet. Instead encryption is used with the password as a key making it virtually impossible for even a determined snooper to figure out what that password is.

And third, the security systems used are all just part of the standard Internet email system. If you don’t worry about people reading your email from your regular email server then you should have no reason to worry about their reading your email from MailRelayer.