This week, I thought I'd discuss ways for you to get access to your e-mail messages in the quickest way possible, so that you can do it hundreds of times a day if you want to. Such is the arbitrary nature of man.

In a technical sense, there are two fundamentally different approaches to sending and receiving e-mail messages: Web-based systems and client applications. The former, such as Penn State's creatively named WebMail, keep your e-mail messages on the server. The latter approach, with Microsoft Outlook being the most popular example, downloads messages from the server and leaves them on your own computer.

As Penn State students, we're given a choice: We can continue to use WebMail, dutifully accessing it with our Web browsers several times a day, or we can move to a client application.

The thing you probably care most about with e-mail is that you actually be able to access it. With a Web-based application, you can access your e-mail from (almost) any browser, running on any computer anywhere at any time.

What's more, if you typically use e-mail on more than one machine (one at school and one at work, for example), the Web-based system allows you to always have the most up-to-date view on messages you've sent and received.

Client applications are typically less flexible, in the sense that your messages are usually downloaded to, and remain on, your main computer. To add more confusion, there are different technical standards for client applications (POP and IMAP) that blur the line between the two, but that's beyond the scope of this column.

One of the really nice things about Web-based systems is that you typically don't have to worry about making backups of your stored messages; the server will handle all of this for you. The sheer amount of messages that these "hosts" will store has of late been rapidly growing. The big three -- Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail -- all offer between 250 MB and 1 GB of free e-mail storage. I send and receive a pretty good number of messages on any given day, but even at my current rate I won't exceed this capacity for the next four years or so.

If you use a client application, you can store an almost arbitrary amount (a lifetime's worth of messages, for example), but you'd better be prepared to back up those messages, keep an archive around and continue to convert the messages as new e-mail formats emerge (think of upgrading your old home movies to DVD).

If you use a Web-based system, you don't have to deal with the bother of installing and configuring software on your computer -- all you have to do is fire up your browser.

The tradeoff, though, is that you lose some of the cool features and flexibility that client applications offer. Software running on your computer is typically more responsive than applications running across the Internet. When you hit the "reply" button in your client application, you can begin typing almost immediately, whereas on a Web site it might take a few seconds.

Client applications can often integrate with your operating system in some cool ways, making it easy to hit a button in your picture-viewing program and instantly have those pictures e-mailed to a friend, for example. A client application also allows you to put in some bells and whistles, such as a custom spam filter.

Lastly, you can set up a client application to play a sound file whenever you get a message. Web-based systems typically lack this vital functionality.