www.OpenSourceForU.com
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OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU
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JANUARY 2018
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25
For U & Me
Let’s Try
I
n 2004, Google introduced its Gmail service with a 1GB
mailbox and free POP access. This was at a time when most
people had email accounts with their ISP or had free Web
mail accounts with Hotmail or Yahoo. Mailbox storage was
limited to measly amounts such as 5MB or 10MB. If you did
not regularly purge old messages, then your incoming mail
would bounce with the dreaded ‘Inbox full’ error. Hence,
it was a standard practice to store email ‘offline’ using an
email client. Each year now, a new generation of young
people (mostly students) discover the Internet and they start
with Web mail straight away. As popular Web mail services
integrate online chatting as well, they prefer to use a Web
browser rather than a desktop mail client to access email. This
is sad because desktop email clients represent one of those
rare Internet technologies that can claim to have achieved
perfection. This article will bring readers up to speed on
Thunderbird, the most popular FOSS email client.
Why use a desktop email client?
With an email client, you store emails offline. After
the email application connects to your mail server and
downloads new mail, it instructs the server to delete those
messages from your mailbox (unless configured otherwise).
This has several advantages.
If your account gets hacked, the hacker will not get your
archived messages. This also limits the fallout on your
other accounts such as those of online banking.
Web mail providers such as Gmail read your messages to
display ‘relevant’ advertisements. This is creepy, even if it
is software-driven.
Email clients let you read and compose messages offline.
A working Net connection is not required. Web mail
requires you to log in first.
Web mail providers such as Gmail automatically
tell your contacts whether you are online or if your
camera is on. Email clients do not do this.
Modern Web browsers take many liberties without
asking. Chrome, by default, listens to your microphone
and uploads conversations to Google servers (for your
convenience of course). Email clients are not like that.
Searching archived messages is extremely powerful on
desktop mail clients. There is no paging of the results.
When popular Web mail providers offer free POP access,
why suffer the slowness of the Web?
POP or IMAP access to email
Email clients use two protocols, POP and IMAP, to receive
mail. POP is ideal if you want to download and delete mail.
IMAP is best if you need access on multiple devices or
at different locations. POP is more prevalent than IMAP.
For offline storage, POP is the best. Popular Web mail
providers provide both POP and IMAP access. Before you
can use an email client, you will have to log in to your Web
mail provider in a browser, check the settings and activate
POP/IMAP access for incoming mail. Email clients use
the SMTP protocol for outgoing mail. In Thunderbird/
SeaMonkey, you may have to add SMTP server settings
separately for each email account.
If you have lots of email already online, then it may not
be possible to make your email client create an offline copy in
one go. Each time you choose to receive messages, the mail
client will download a few hundred of your old messages.
After it has downloaded all your old archived messages,
the mail client will then settle down to downloading
only your newest messages.
The settings for some popular Web mail services
are as follows:
Hotmail/Live/Outlook
Learn to use and store email messages offline with
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.
Tricks to Try Out on
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey