www.GANNZ.com

The Merits and Demerits of E-Mail Clients

An email client is an application that helps to handle and send your electronic mail right across servers on the web, and is run of your personal computer or in other words, your operating system (i.e Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac Os, Linux, Ubuntu etc). This is in contrast with your ordinary @yahoo, @aol, @hotmail, @live or other email account (all public email clients), which is managed/handled off an Internet server. 

 

The implication of the fact that an email is managed of the Internet is that your email are stored on a hard disk away from you and managed by the public email client. Thus, interaction with your email is thus reduced. The merits and demerits of your public email client are as followed.

 

MERITS

• It’s available for free.

• You can interact with your email in a myriad of ways online.

• Since its free, it’s for the most part disposable

• With the most popular public email clients you are assured of some security.

 

DEMERITS

• Since its free, disposable and not tightly associated with anyone, it is thus most convenient for scammers and fraudsters. Hence the existence of the term “yahoo boy”¹.

• If you ask even Sarah Palin (the American Republican Vice Presidential aspirant) of recent, she’d tell you that their very insecure and too easily hacked into².

• Not unrelated to the above mentioned demerits, they are often associated with scams and being of a temporary nature.

• It is quite difficult to interact with your email’s whenever you are off line as such you are entrusting your important emails with yahoo, this is not overly unlike entrusting your physical mail with NIPOST all year round; you go down to the post office, read your mail from the University you applied too, or your bank statement and then leave it in the post office.

 

PRIVATE MAIL CLIENTS

Examples of private e-mail clients are Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Mac Os X mail, Opera Mail, Windows Mail, Versa Mail, Mulberry inter alia. Such email clients are based on your hard drive and primarily download your e-mail’s to your personal computer or even your PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Still in line with the NIPOST analogy, an email client sort of allows you have your email delivered to your home, office or even your car. Some public mail clients (eg. Yahoo, AOL, MSN and GMAIL) for all its advantages offer you the use of emails that can be configured to your private mail clients as premium services at an extra cost in most cases. The merits and demerits of private e-mail clients are as follows.

 

MERITS

• They download your e-mail to your personal computer and as such allow you to interact with all of your messages even while you are off line akin to an ability to actually receive your mail since you have the option to “clean up the server”³ every time you download your messages.

• It can be configured to work over a small private network, as such with the use of an email client such as Microsoft’s Outlook Express you can send electronic mail across a small network with any number of computers from 10 ad infinitum (right across the Internet).

• It allows you to draft your e-mails while off line and send them as soon as there is an Internet connection, especially when on a mobile device (laptop or PDA) opening the opportunity for working off line.

• The fact that IMAP/POP3/SMTP⁴ supporting e-mails are usually not free and are paid for by credit or debit card means that the identity of the owners of e-mail addresses can somewhat be verified.

• With POP3 access an added advantage is that the server is less burdened with email since e-mails are taken of the server.

• POP3 is widely supported.

• It is a lot more secure and the user has a lot more control over the security of the e-mails.

 

DEMERITS

• Can be quite slow to check e-mail in the absence of good bandwidth or a good Internet connection or when downloading large attachments.

• E-mail clients requires manual configuration⁵ in some cases, which can be quite challenging to carry out without the help of a professional or an advanced user.

 

 

BASIC CONFIGURATION OF AN E-MAIL CLIENT

Go to your e-mail client’s options, usually under tools in the menu bar. You need to click the tab for mail delivery and then click on accounts. In some mail clients the options might be configured in a different way but for the most part, look for tools, options and accounts. Here you can add an account, edit an account, import or create an account.

To find your mail client, in Windows XP click on,

>Start

>Run…

Type>Outlook.exe

In Window’s Vista, Microsoft’s new email client is simply called Windows Mail so simply type “Windows mail” in the search bar.

 

RECOMMENDED E-MAIL CLIENTS

The following are five good e-mail clients compatible with the major operating systems or for one or the other.

 

1. Microsoft Outlook (irrespective of the year)

2. Microsoft’s Outlook Express

3. Mozilla Thunderbird⁶

4. Opera Mail

5. Mac OsX Mail

 

REFERENCES AND FURTHER INFORMATION

• http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10045969-83.html Sarah Palin’s hacked e-mail and Yahoo mail vulnerability.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients more info on Wikipedia

• http://www.emailclients.net/ has a lot of info on e-mail clients

• http://email.about.com/od/macemailclients/tp/free.htm info on Mac Mail clients

• http://www.covisp.net/email/popimap_faq.html what is POP3? Or IMAP?

• http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/freeemail.shtml links to mail clients.

Article by Tolu Akinsanya

For www.GANNZ.com/Webdesign

Tolu Akinsanya is a web designer and an advanced user of Microsoft’s Windows Operating Systems.

 

1Internet fraudsters in Nigeria as well are too often in favour of emails@yahoo.com hence the term yahoo boys, but they are not unknown to favour other public email clients.

 

2Please see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10045969-83.html

 

3To take your messages of the server with POP3 access.

 

4POP3/IMAP/SMTP – POP3 Post Office Protocol 3/ Interactive Mail Access Protocol/Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

 

5A lot of the most recently released e-mail clients can download most of the necessary settings.

 

6To download, search for 3 or 4 in any good Internet search engine e.g Http://www.google.com

 

(A VALUE ADDED SERVICE FROM GANNZ.com/WEBDESIGN)