If you've got multiple e-mail accounts then keeping track of what you are receiving can be an absolute nightmare involving multiple browsers and lots of confusion.

A far better solution is something like POP Peeper which is an easy to use email notifier that runs in Windows task bar and alerts you when you have new email on POP3, IMAP, Windows LiveMail, Yahoo, GMail, Mail.com, MyWay, Excite, Lycos.com, RediffMail, Juno and NetZero accounts. The fact that it supports so many webmail accounts makes this a really attractive app although in reality, you may find that it doesn't detect mail until considerably after it has arrived in your account, if at all - especially with Windows Live Mail. However, it does allow you to send e-mail directly from POP Peeper and use the address book to email your frequently used contacts. Messages can be viewed in both HTML and plain text although newsletters and other mail with heavy graphics won't display properly in plain text. One major bonus is that POP Peeper is so small that it can be can be run from a portable device and password protected which means that it's fairly secure and is a decent solution for anyone on the move a lot.

Although it doesn't give you full control over your e-mail accounts, and may not even work properly with all webmail accoutns, this is worth trying if you have multiple e-mail accounts.