The webmail is a part of the old Riverland Internet website which allows you to read your email. If you've used Hotmail or Yahoo for email, it's like that: ours works with email addresses @riverland.net.au. The webmail is here - or you can find it from the old Riv Internet homepage, www.riverland.net.au

Because it's a webpage, you can use the webmail from any computer that allows you to access webpages. You could use it from a computer in an internet cafe, workplace, or friend's house. Like an email program installed on your PC, the webmail can read your email, delete messages, send and forward them.

Differences from a “real” email program:

• The webmail shows you messages that are stored on our server. Outlook shows you messages that have been received from our server, and are now stored on your computer's hard disk. Also, your webmail address book and preferences are stored on our webserver, not your PC.
• You have to be online the whole time you're reading and writing email.
• Messages don't stay there forever. Our housekeeping will delete them after some period between 1 and 6 months.

The webmail is useful for occasional access, but we still recommend that our customers set up an email program on their own PC. This will have more features, and because the messages are stored on your PC, you can keep the messages for as long as you wish.

Some things to keep in mind when using the webmail:

• If you're checking your mail from someone else's computer, such as one in an internet cafe or library, you should close the browser window after logging out of the webmail.
• It's worth looking through your Preferences (in the menu on the left, once you've logged in). If you've changed your Riverland email address to something different to your username, you'll want to change it here too. Remember to click Save at the bottom of Preferences screen.
• If you use both the webmail and another email program, best to set the email program to leave messages on the server for a few weeks. Without this setting, some email programs delete messages from the server as soon as they have downloaded them, and the webmail never sees them.