Hi,
where the mail is always depends on your setup.
In general, an email is received and stored by your provider.
Now you can access it - the provider offers you ways how you can access the email. There are a lot of different ways that you could use:
- Webmail - that way you do not download the mail to your system. The email is stored at the provider and you simply read it in your webbrowser.
- POP3 - that is a protocol which is used to access emails in your inbox. This protocol is used to download the mails. So the mails will be on your client after the download. And your application will have a setting whether you want to delete the message
after downloading it or keep it. A common setting is, that the message is deleted so the setup is, that the provider just holds the messages till you download and delete them so that the messages are only on your client.
- IMAP3 - that is a protocol which is used to synchronize messages. So your client connects to the server and compares local emails with the emails on the server. New messages will be downloaded but also stay on the server. Emails that you deleted in your
client are also deleted on the server and emails that was deleted on the server will be deleted on your client.
- Then there are other protocols e.g. Microsofts Exchange protocols which are like imap3 to synchronize emails. These often offer additional features e.g. pushing emails to clients and stuff like that.
So it fully depends on your setup.
With kind regards,
Konrad
