For a growing number of people, the office does not end in a downtown building or a suburban business park. Dial-in accounts allow many employees to tap into corporate e-mail from their homes. Fortunately, it's easy to set up your computer to sift through work messages without disrupting the settings for your personal e-mail account.

Game stats or cash-flow statements?
Financial analyst Lou Kotler uses e-mail to communicate with members of the softball team he manages; and keeps in touch with his work from the same computer at home.

Three days a week Kotler works at the Port of Seattle headquarters or at other port properties. But on the days he's at home he likes to stay on top of his Inbox by dialing in to retrieve new e-mail from his employer's computer network.

"I get so many e-mails," said Kotler. "Instead of coming into the office and spending half an hour going through my emails I can see them at home. It holds down the 'noise'."

With the softball season underway, Kotler uses a personal e-mail account to get messages to team members. He also sends and receives messages from far-flung family members. His family has an account with an Internet Service Provider, which is accessed via a high-speed DSL service.

If your workplace allows you to telecommute or at least peruse your e-mail from home, you can easily take advantage of it without disturbing any other e-mail accounts you have access to.

For example, you might not want to mix e-mails on corporate marketing policy with correspondence from the neighborhood softball team. And that's fine, because you can create two or more separate dial-up accounts and keep resulting e-mail completely separate using Outlook Express.

Setting up to dial-in
If your employer lets you retrieve your e-mail remotely, you'll need to create another dail-up account. Here's how:

1. From the desktop screen, click My Computer.
2. Click Dial-Up Networking.
3. Follow the steps in the Connection Wizard, taking care to enter the dial-up number provided by your employer. Once all the details are entered, right-click the dial-up icon to rename it something you can recognize readily.

To keep the e-mail you will download from your workplace separate from any personal e-mail you might download from your ISP, it is wise to create a separate e-mail profile or identity, which you might compare to a new post office box that won't get letters addressed to your old box: you continue to hold the keys to both.

Create multiple identities
You can create multiple identities using Outlook Express. For example, you can create an identity for your work e-mail and one for your personal e-mail. You can also extend this idea to cover each of your kids, your roommates or others who will share the same computer. By doing so each person with a separate identity (and separate e-mail account) can use Outlook Express but the mail will not get mixed up with messages intended for other users of the same computer.

To set up a new identity:

1. From the Outlook Express main menu, click File and then Identities.
2. Select Add New Identity and type in the user's name (full or partial is fine).
3. Click Close.

To create a default identity:

1. Click File and then Identities.
2. Select Manage identities.
3. Choose the identity you wish to set as the default one.
4. Click default.
5. Click close. 

To change from one user identity to another:

1. Click File and then Switch identity.
2. Select the name desired.
3. Click OK.

Gordon Black has a different identity for when he's at home.