Sharing e-mail on multiple computers

I’ve had my laptop for a few months now. For the previous 9 years we had only 1 internet connected computer in the house. I had developed a reasonable system of organizing our computer files and e-mails on 1 computer, but the addition of the laptop has been confusing to me. Where should I store the files? How do I sync the 2 machines?

One of the biggest sources of contention has been e-mail. My husband and I have a shared e-mail account that is our main account. In addition I have a g-mail account that I’ve used mainly for signing up on webpages and other internet related things. (My Facebook and Twitter accounts are connected there for example.) I wanted to be able to read our personal e-mail on our laptop so first I tried reading it on-line. Big yuck! Then I started using Outlook on my laptop. However, my husband felt out of the loop since he wasn’t seeing the e-mail.

Just last week I found what I think is the solution to our problem. First, I moved all my homeschool e-mail groups to the g-mail account. Then I set up the g-mail account to retrieve the mail from our joint e-mail LEAVING the e-mail on the server. (In g-mail, click settings, then the accounts and import tab, finally add POP3 e-mail account.) Then, I set up Outlook on my laptop to retrieve from the g-mail account instead of our joint account. This way I can read all the e-mail, both mine and our shared account, on my laptop, AND my husband can come home, open Outlook on the desktop computer and retrieve all the e-mail from our shared account. Now he doesn’t feel like he’s missing e-mail and I don’t have to share my laptop. It is definitely working for me!