Your email lives on a server, so every device shows the same inbox.
In January 2018 I published a Teach My Mom video on how to access your email. It followed the one on what an email is. I used the post office to explain two ideas, the inbox and the outbox, and then showed why your phone, tablet and computer all see the same mail.
The business case
This isn't a business video, but the idea behind it matters to anyone with customers. A lot of people still picture their email as something stored on their own computer. When they switch to a phone and the message is there too, it can feel like a trick.
The mail sits with the provider, and each device is a window onto it. Once someone gets that, they stop worrying about which device they used to send something. If your customers are new to this, a short explanation like this one saves a lot of support questions.
The video is from 2018, so a few names have aged. I've dated them below.
Start with the mailbox at home
I started with physical mail because most people already understand it. The postman carries a bag full of mail. He finds the piece with your address on it and drops it in your mailbox.
Some houses have a box at the side. In a condo or an apartment building it's usually a row of little slots. The mail carrier drops the mail in from the back, and you open your slot and take it out.
Sending mail the old way
Now flip it around. Say you want to send a letter to me. You drop it in a mailbox on the street, or you take it straight to the post office. In my example that was the United States Post Office, but any local post office works.
The postman empties the mailbox, and the post office routes the letter until it lands in my box.
Inbox and outbox
This is the part I most wanted my mom to remember. When the postman drops mail into your box, that box is your inbox. It's where incoming mail goes.
When you send mail, it goes into an outbox, the box for outgoing mail. Those two ideas carry over exactly into the digital world. Your email has an inbox and an outbox too.
Gmail and Yahoo are the post offices
In the earlier video I compared mail carriers like FedEx and UPS. For email, the carriers are mail providers. I used two in the video, Gmail, which is Google's mail, and Yahoo Mail.
I said I prefer Gmail because I think it's a better service. Someone else might have an account with Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail, which is now Microsoft's Outlook.com. It doesn't matter which one. The idea is the same.
To send an email, you go to gmail.com and log in first. Logging in got its own video later in the series. Once you're in, you compose your email the way you'd write a letter, and you press send.
Jump to
- 0:00 Picking up from "What is an email"
- 0:24 The physical mailbox
- 2:24 Inbox and outbox
- 3:45 Gmail and Yahoo as mail providers
- 6:22 Across to Yahoo's server
- 7:33 Where your sent mail goes
- 10:08 Same email on any device
The whole video runs a little over 13 minutes on my channel: How to access my Email? Teach My Mom, on YouTube.
Across to Yahoo's server
When you press send, Gmail takes the email and passes it across the internet to Yahoo's server. In the video I sent it to an address at Yahoo. Yahoo plays the postman. It knows exactly which inbox the message belongs in and puts it there.
In the physical world it would be like the US Postal Service handing a letter to Canada's postal service. Here it's one mail service handing a message to another over the internet.
On my end, I log in and check my inbox. Since it isn't physical, the inbox is just a list. The emails I haven't read show up in bold, and the ones I've already read don't.
Where your sent mail goes
The email you sent doesn't really leave your account. Because it's digital, the server sends a copy to the other person and keeps a copy for you.
That copy sits in your outbox, so you can go back and look at what you sent. Most services call it "Sent" or "Sent items" rather than outbox. In the video I treated those names as the same thing, and they are.
The same email on any device
The last idea clears up the most confusion. You can reach your email from any computer in the world, as long as it has internet access.
On a laptop you open a browser and go to gmail.com. On an iPad you tap the Mail icon and see the same list of mail you saw on the computer. Send an email from the iPad and it goes through the same Gmail server.
Behind the scenes, your computer, iPad or phone connects to the provider's server. Technically, nothing is stored on your device. It's all sitting on the server.
If someone sends you an email, you can read it on your phone, your iPad or your computer. Send one from your phone and you'll see it in Sent on your computer too. The programs work a little differently, but each one has an inbox and a sent folder. The real difference is screen size. The phone is smallest, the tablet is bigger, and the computer is biggest.
What came next
At the end I said the next video would explain logging in, since I'd mentioned it without explaining it. The earlier parts of this series cover browsers, search, and what an email is.
If you're a non-technical founder starting from this level, I also wrote about why Cloudflare is easier than it looks.
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These days I build software in the open. If you want to see the real process and ask questions while it happens, join me live on Friday.
About Dwain
I'm Dwain Browne, Founder of LeadScore AI and SnapSuite. I'm a Toronto-based software architect with 25+ years across software, sales, operations and entrepreneurship. SnapSuite helps contractors and trades teams get paid faster, and LeadScore AI shows you which leads deserve your next call. I also run Vibe Code to Profit, a community helping people build software with AI.