Webmail has many disadvantages as compared to using a desktop email client.
1). Webmail is slower; you have to wait for each mail page to open, and some webmails on a busy hour take eons to open.
2). There is the problem of limited space; you must, from time to time, delete your older webmail or else your mail box gets littered, and the page starts loading slower and slower. Still worse, you mail size may exceed the mail box size, and then your webmail account gets suspended!
3). You cannot customize your mails with artistic background, designer signatures etc.
4). If yours is a paid dialup connection, you burn both your precious paid time and the phone bill, as you must stay online for a longer period to read all your mails!
Instead, if you employ a desktop email client, you can connect briefly to the net, download all your mails from the POP3 server in a ziffy, go offline, and read your mail leisurely! There is also no fear of your mailbox getting cluttered, as everytime you download the mails on to your desktop, you mailbox gets emptied, and is ready for receiving fresh mail again.
As soon as I realized this, I shifted from webmail to POP3 in combination with a desktop email client.
My tryst with email clients began with Microsoft Outlook. It came preloaded on my PC along with the rest of the MS Office pack. Outlook was actually a little more than an email client. It had journal and diary features and worked also as an organizer. I could feed my appointments and schedules into my Microsoft Outlook. It could even provide artistic backgrounds to my email. It was also Hotmail friendly, and my first email account being Hotmail, I was more than satisfied with Outlooks's performance. Outlook at that time was unique in the sense that it also had an integrated'read detection' facility(which was later integrated into other mail clients also); as soon as the recipient opened your email and read it, you would be sent a receipt, mentioning the date & time of opening, and the computer's name.
I was also told that there is a clipped down version of Outlook, called Outlook Express, which is a free download. Outlook Express does not have the journal and diary features, and is one of the components of Microsoft's integrated browser, the MS-Explorer now bundled with Windows XP.
My love affair with MS-Outlook ended one fine morning, when my PC was infected with a mass-mailing worm, I-Worm-Klez, which made mince-meat of the mails I stored in my MS-Outlook folders. It was then that I came to know that MS-Outlook is also known as'look out' owing to its susceptibility to worms and viruses. I had to delete it from my desktop!
After brief flings with Eudora(which I was told was the first email client ever to be made, and is loaded with spyware by Qualcomm, its maker), Pagassus Mail(which was a freeware and a decent mail client), and the mail client of the Netscape's integrated browser(which was too slow!), my next affair was with the Opera mail client.
Incidentally, Opera is one of the fastest browsers on earth, and it had an integrated mail client that could handle POP3, IMAP, and HTML mails(I won't enter into discussions about good and bad aspects of POP3/IMAP/HTML mailing for the fear of exceeding word limit. I can merely say that POP3 is the plain, simple text mail, consuming least band width, and while HTML mail allows you to have designer mails, it also consumes maximum bandwidth and is slower). Opera's'M2' mail client has been referred to as'revolutionary' by the Opera people, and was quick and adept at sending and receiving the emails. But it could not give me that'extra kick, ' and there was nothing special about it.
That was till I came across a mail client called Incredimail XE.'My God, what a mail client, ' I thought! Firstly, it was fast, infact faster than Opera's M2(I actually timed both of them!); you can actually see the progress of send/receipt operations in a window. Added to that, is the spectacular capacity to set backgrounds, animations, and voices in your mail(the choice of the backgrounds/animations/voices is again limitless, and you will get tired of downloading hundreds of them). There is then the animated mail-intimation. All this is for free! There is infact the paid version of Incredimail XE, but you need not necessarily have it to enjoy the Incredimail experience! Incredimail has a read-detection system too. So far I have stuck to Incredimail XE as my mail client, though I keep experimenting with freeware downloaded from freeware sites.
For personal use, freely downloadable email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Vivian Mail, Fox Mail, Phoenix Mail, Speed Mail, Poco Mail, Popcorn, The Bat, Black Box Mail, Delta Mail, Dev Mail, Quick Send, Quick Mail, E-Mail Creations, Instinct Mailer, Allegro Mail, Netmail, 1PopCheck, Active Mail, Acorn Mail, AK Mail, Avir Mail, @ny Mail, Click Mail 32, Check Mail, Calypso, I-Scribe, Kerio Mail Server, Kaufman Mail Warrior, Mail Expert, GearVox Talking Email, Munite(an email client that arranges emails in threads), Starfish Family Mail, K Mail, PC-PINE, Becky, Mulberry, Izy Mail, Visual Mail, Web2Pop, YAMC(stands for Yet Another Mail Client!), Sylpheed-Claws, Geminisoft Pimmy, and Mahogany are available. Infact there is no end to this list., and it is a good idea to try some of them to see which one of them suits you the best!
If you want an business/industrial email client, or a mass-mailer, then the choices are different, and you can use programmes like Dynamail, Mass Mailer, etc., which have not been discussed herein.
Lastly, some advice to those friends who are using email clients which are without the'read-detection' function. You have two freewares, 'havetheyreadityet, ' and'sentthere, ' both of which can add the'read detection' functionality to your email client.
'Havetheyreadityet, ' is infact an MS-Outlook Express plug-in, and it inserts an HTML link pertaining to a small stamp image(the link points to the'havetheyreadityet' server) in your outgoing mail. Your mail then passes through your usual SMTP server. When the mail is displayed on the recipient's desktop, the stamp image is downloaded from'havetheyreadityet' server, and the server notes down the date & time, and name of the computer requesting for downloading the image, and mails it back to you! Because you don't have to route your SMTP mail through the'havetheyreadityet' server, even if that server is down for some reason for some time, your mail sending will not be affected.
'Sentthere' works differently. There are no stamp images here! Your SMTP mail is actually routed through the'sentthere' server, and you have to configure your email client accordingly. If the'sentthere' server is down for some reason, your mail cannot be sent! But unlike'havetheyreadityet' which works only with Outlook Express, 'sentthere' works with all email clients!
There is also a word of advice for my friends who are wilting under spam in their mail box. There are two kinds of freewares available to get your mail rid of spam.
1). Spam bouncers: They will help you to bounce the spam as if your mail account never existed. Most spammer sites would delete your mail address from their database if the mail is bounced, but this does not work with all of them!
2). Spam eaters: This kind of software actually eats away the mail from known spammers in its database before the mail is actually downloaded on to your desktop mail client. You can add to this database. I would suggest that you use both these kinds of software.
If you want the names of specific sites from where any of this software can be downloaded, you may mail me. All the best to you, and happy mailing!
