Like most of us today, Colin Palmer finds his business and personal life frequently overlap. The director of a fast-growing company building wind-energy farms all over the world, Palmer has to juggle messages and appointments between offices around the globe from his home office in Bristol.

E-mail long ago overtook the phone as his primary means of communication, but last Christmas disaster struck. Palmer’s Mac suffered a catastrophic hard-drive failure. While his office e-mail survived — because, like most corporate systems, it is backed up — his personal message store disappeared in a flash.

As Palmer now knows, the loss need never have happened. The problem was, he relied on the e-mail account supplied by his internet service provider (ISP). Only when his computer turned belly-up did he discover how inadequate and out of date free services like this really are. Most run on a standard known as POP3, an internet e-mail system now more than two decades old. The idea is simple: any message sent to you sits in a temporary online folder until your computer picks it up and stores it, or loses it, should the gremlins call. POP3 goes back to the days when storing anything, anywhere was costly. The central servers that send and receive e-mail were designed for dispatching messages, not storing them.

So, the responsibility for keeping mail falls to you and your machine. Want to put a message aside into a folder to look at later? With POP3, that is impossible without special software — and, if you change computer or suffer a system crash, every last e-mail may well disappear.

Savvy e-mailers have been fleeing from POP3 for some time, spurred in part by Google’s new free service, Gmail, which offers 2GB of message storage to anyone, with the promise that the days of deleting e-mail are long gone. Gmail is only one horse in the race, and it’s a contender with several handicaps. As it is a proprietary system, you can’t move to a similar one elsewhere if you are dissatisfied or need more features. It pushes you to view mail through a web browser, with an awkward interface and discreet ads alongside your mail, which is fine, though slow, if you are online, and impossible if your connection goes down. If you do want to use conventional e-mail software, you can currently receive your Gmail only through the selfsame POP3 standard many people want to avoid.

Palmer’s solution proved infinitely more powerful — an open industry standard called Imap (internet message access protocol) that can be found through many providers, free and paid-for. Your ISP may even be quietly offering it too, if you ask. Imap was designed to take the job of storing messages away from local computers and onto the net. Instead of downloading e-mail to the unsafe hazards of your computer, you leave it securely on servers on the net and read it there, a bit like Hotmail, without being tied to a single company.

There are free Imap providers such as FastMail (www.fastmail.fm), but most serious mailers will pay modest fees for greater storage and superior features, such as spam and virus control. Palmer now pays £18 a year for unlimited e-mail storage with an Australian company, Alien Camel (www.aliencamel.com), and has never looked back.

“Two features really attracted me to them,” he said. “One, the promise that everything is always backed up on their system. Two, the technical support, which was amazing — they came back with answers as soon as I had a question. They even changed the webmail interface when I suggested an improvement.”

You continue to use the normal mail clients you have today, such as Outlook Express and Thunderbird, but with more options. You can create folders for specific subjects, such as shopping, travel or work, and drag messages into them for safekeeping. Everything remains on the net, though you can also copy messages to your local computer with your normal e-mail client software, so they are safe in the unlikely event that Alien Camel goes down. It’s probably a good idea occasionally to back up your e-mail archive and contacts onto external media, too.

These messages can then be viewed in many different ways, through a client program such as Outlook, a webmail interface such as Internet Explorer, or even through a palmtop or mobile phone.

Couple that with the improved spam and virus protection from commercial e-mail services and, in Palmer’s view, Alien Camel is an unbeatable prospect. Messages can stay around securely for years on end, available everywhere. If you find yourself at the check-in at the airport — without your electronic ticket printout — you could access the flight details instantly on your phone. E-mail simply becomes a store of information living securely on the net, viewable however you choose to access it.

Some advanced mail services now offer clever tools to synchronise your contacts and calendar, and as Palmer is already beginning to discover, paying for your e-mail brings other benefits. “I like the spam-control features — I am fed up with seeing junk in my inbox, and they take care of it.”

Most commercial services have a plethora of tools to fight spam and viruses before they ever reach you. Senders can be blacklisted or whitelisted — meaning they will be banned or always allowed through. The system will sort mail and give you a report on suspect messages, enabling you to deal with the dross before it comes near your machine.

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