Email Programs and how-to email
There are several ways to send and receive emails and during the Monday evening meetings we have discussed a number of approaches.
There are two main different ways
1. Through your internet browser
2. Through an emailing client [program] that runs on you local machine
The key differences between these two approaches are;
1. Browser based. The internet browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox or …) is used to log on to your email account and then you read and write your emails through that account. The emails are always on the email ’server’ [and not on you local machine. You need an internet connection to be able to use emails this way.
2. Email program based. The emails are stored both on your email 'server' and on your local machine. The email client [program] talks to the ’server’ and sends and receives the emails between the two computers.
You can write emails whilst you are not connected to internet in this approach and you have a local copy of the email to refer to if you are not on-line.
If you are used to using the Browser approach, the supplier of the email service usually have a way of configuring your local email client [program] to allow the local email client[program] to connect and send and receive the emails.
If you use the browser approach, there will be Internet Explorer already available on a Windows machine. There are other browser choices - like Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome [Google browser]. There is a personal preference part to your choice.
Email Clients [programs].
Windows tends to have Outlook Express installed as the default email client. There are a number of others.
Microsoft Outlook is a very full functional email client which also offers a very good contact manager [address book] and copes very well with browser interface too - it can behave like a combined email program and browser too.
Another very popular email client is Thunderbird. This comes from the Mozilla stable which was derived from Netscape series of tools. Thunderbird is a very capable email program and can be extended to add more capabilities as they are required [you install additional programs that Thunderbird adds to it's tool bar]. Many people around the world develop these new programs as needs are identified - new items are available every week which you can choose to take or ignore; it makes for a very exciting adventure keeping up with new technology.
Thunderbird has it quirks and is not as easy to set up as the Microsoft equivalents, but it is touted as being ’safer’ that Outlook Express and less vulnerable to internet security attacks.
Email tutorials
For each of these email applications, there is plenty of websites and supports already written. Here are some links to the key information websites.
Microsoft Outlook Express Tutorial
Microsoft Outlook tutorial and help
There is lots of reading here; probably more in these tutorials than I currently know. If you follow the tutorials and need an explanation, please let me know and I’ll focus on it one Monday session.
Regards
David
If any of these links break and no longer work, please let us know. Thanks.