You are welcome to use any email client or the built-in webmail tool to access your pool email accounts.
At Member Splash we use Gmail. Not only do you get an enormous amount of free storage (15 gigs to use across Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos) but it offers superior spam filtering, a host of handy integrations, and many other helpful tools.
What you might not realize is that you can send and receive from as many accounts as you like with Gmail via the Accounts and Import option.
FETCHING EMAIL FROM POOL ACCOUNTS
If you don’t already have one, the first step is signing up for a free Gmail account. You can do that here: https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?service=mail
Once you have a Gmail account log into it and click on the gear icon at the top right of your screen and choose See all Settings from the drop down menu:
Click on the Accounts and Import tab at the top of the Settings screen and scroll down to Check mail from other accounts (using POP3). Select Add a POP3 email account you own.
Fill in the email address you want to add, for example, [email protected], and hit Next Step.
Fill in the account password. There are a couple of options on this screen that are worth noting:
Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server: This box is unchecked by default. When Gmail checks your other account it will pull any messages and delete them from the Member Splash server. If you are the only one using the account you might prefer this option. If there are other people at the pool who might also be checking the account and you want them to see all messages you can check this box and Gmail will not delete the copy from the Member Splash server.
Label incoming messages: We highly recommend you use this feature. Gmail uses labels in place of folders. You can create as many labels as you like; you can nest labels (ex: Teams -> Swim, Teams -> Dive); and messages can have multiple labels. We use them to keep emails from different accounts easily sortable in our inboxes. An example use for a pool would be to create a label for your club name, then create a sub label the reflects what a particular pool email account is for, ex: Membership. When you add [email protected] to Gmail you can then select to have any message from that account automatically labeled: Club Name -> Accounting.
Once you have made your selections click Add Account. From this point on Gmail will fetch email from the account you have added and display it in your inbox.
SENDING EMAIL FROM POOL ACCOUNTS
On the same settings screen as above there is a section labeled Send Mail As. To send email from your pool account — so that it shows to recipients as being from [email protected] rather than Gmail — click on Add another email address you own. Fill in the email address you would like to send as and leave the box Treat as an alias checked. That setting means that if you click reply to a pool email message it will automatically reply from the pool email address (as opposed to your Gmail address).
Click Next Step. Most of the settings should already be filled out. If not, use the following:
SMTP Server: mail.pooldomain.com
Username: The email address you are sending as
Password: The password for that email address
Port: 587
Secured connection using TLS: Checked
Save your settings and you are now ready to send from that account