We were recently asked what is the difference between an email account and an email. We thought we’d also share our answer with you.

An Email Account is an ID that can get email messages. Email is the messages. You can delete Email and still have a valid account (you do it every day). You can also delete an Email Account and still have all of the Email messages that you downloaded previously. They are independent events.

Forwarding Email from one account to another is done at the server level (Martyn the postmaster). Forwarding means redirecting any Email for one account to another account. Sometimes we copy both accounts.

Outlook is an email butler. You could go to Google mail (the post office) directly yourself via the web to get your email. But you would rather “Outlook the butler” to do it for you.

You can tell Outlook go get my mail here is the account information (my post office key). You can also give Outlook the butler multiple keys to fetch other emails for you.  If the postmaster is forwarding emails from one account to another then Outlook only needs the one key.