Some 2.7 trillion e-mails will have been sent by people around the world by the end of this year alone. If you feel the majority of them are ending up in your in-box, you're not the only one. E-mail fatigue has become a common business complaint.

Increasingly, co-workers seem to figure there's no point in walking 10 feet to a colleague's desk and having a brief conversation when a 300-word e-mail mini-essay will do.

This can become a major headache when off on a business trip or holiday without account access for a few days. Messages appear to have spawned in the interval. While the backlog may make users feel that they are, after all, quite popular amongst their your friends and colleagues. Perhaps reading e-mail while on the road would make life a little easier. This is actually very easily done, and does not require payment for a special account all that is needed is Internet access.

The first requirement is a free Web-based email account. A number of sites will give one in exchange for tolerating a few advertisements. Some well-established sites are:

www.hotmail.com;

www.bigfoot.com;

www.netaddress.com;

or www.rocketmail.com.

Go to the site and follow the simple directions to register for an account. It can be accessed any time it is possible to get on the Web from a laptop, or from a cybercafe, while visiting another company abroad. Now, set up your account to collect email which has been delivered to your other e-mail accounts (as long as they are POP accounts, or more correctly, POP3 Post Office Protocol the standard format for Internet mail delivery). Log on to your Web account, and a button labelled Settings, Options or Features should be displayed.

Click into that area and find the section for POP accounts or retrieving email from other accounts. It will ask for three pieces of information: the user name for that account, then the POP server name, then the password to that account. Say you want to get e-mail from your home account, which is joe@indigo.ie. For user name, enter "joe". Your POP server name is usually in the format "mail". followed by the words that come after the @ in your email address. For Indigo accounts, it's mail.indigo.ie (but just phone the service provider if unsure). Then enter your password to that POP account, which will remain in a hidden format.

Now, go back to the in-box page of your Web mail account. There should be a button or interactive text labelled "POP Mail" or similar. Click it; and voila! In a few seconds your e-mail will be gathered off the server and brought to your Web account. Note that some company Internet firewalls won't allow access to work accounts in this way.

Be aware, Web e-mail is a slow read, since each message is an individual Web page which must be summoned.

But even then, many e-mail browsers such as Netscape and Eudora allow access to other POP accounts check the "settings" section. Either way, you need never again return to a dialogue box saying you have 197 unread e-mail messages.