Do you have an email account at a website that you can't collect with your favorite email program? Do you really like having all your email downloaded to YOUR computer, and not left lying around on some company's mail server somewhere? Allow me to introduce you to Freepops, your http-mail-poppin' buddy.

"POP mail" (or Post Office Protocol mail) is the more traditional type of email, where one uses a program written especially to collect, sort and manage your mail on your computer after downloading and removing it from your internet/email provider's server. This is parallel to the real life scenario where one goes to the post office, collects their mail and travels home where it will be sorted, read and possibly filed for safekeeping.

There's a second popular method of getting mail, and it's not like real life at all. Check out the "IMAP mail" protocol;   imagine you go to the post office and open your little box, you toss out what you don't want, you stand there and write a response to what you do want, then you stick what you want to keep back in your little box, close it and go home. That's IMAP. Crazy, huh?  It is the basis for most, but not all, Webmail applicaions.

Webmail is the generic term for any of the literally hundreds of email services that let you get email using a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Most people get their email the first time from one of these services. Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail are the two most familiar webmail services, but AOL, Facebook and many other companies provide their users with email that they are only allowed to access using a web-browser and some type of webmail interface.

Many never experience an email program at all unless they are made to use one at their jobs. Webmail involves using one kind of internet language to perform a task that is done in another internet language, a sort of "piggyback" that provides  (1) extra convenience and security for the provider, but it also performs (2) a more crucial task for the company.

1. 1. By disallowing users to connect and download (and/or delete) their messages from a server with an email program, mail servers need only see traffic from the web-servers instead of the entire internet.  It's like the difference between making a chicken coop in your backyard vs in a city park.

1. 2. This webmail-only tactic ties the users to the service by making it inconvenient if not impossible for them to collect and store their own conversations, creations and other data. This is the aquarium idea; you can look at your mail, but you can't take it home with you. It's kinda weird when you get right down to it.

Now, you might think I'm down on IMAP and Webmail, but i'm not. I'm down on Webmail being my only option, because it's my damn mail, and i should be able to download it if i want to, easily and conveniently.

Enter FreePoPs. I love these guys. The project comes from Italy, and contributing coders from all over the world continually update this program - in an ongoing cat and mouse game with the companies who work hard to maintain the two inconveniences noted above.

Here's how it works:

1. 1. Because these companies only allow users to get mail via a web browser, FreePoPs has the ability to go to a website and pretend to be a web browser.
2. 2. When your email program asks for email, FreePoPs reinterprets each request made in whatever format is currently required by the provider's website.
3. 3. The provider believes you are just poking around using a web browser, so it sends the information to FreePoPs, which then removes the excess web-page scripting, and hands the requested email to your email program.

This allows us to simply open our email program and manage all of our email in a single, unified place. Believe me, when you see all of your AOL mail and all of your Yahoo mail pouring into Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail or whatever your favorite email program is, you'll probably never visit the webmail page again... unless you're on vacation!

As the services note that FreePoPs is working, they change the code in their websites to prevent FreePoPs from collecting the user's mail.