There are ways to make your email work best for you
From Outlook to Gmail to Thunderbird, there are plenty of options.
A perplexing aspect of technology is that even tasks that appear to be pretty straightforward can become complicated. That’s certainly true of email.
On the surface email is deceptively simple. When you click on an icon on the desktop or a bookmark in your browser, an interface opens displaying your new emails and any older ones that you have not deleted. Yet you may not know that you are using one of two types of email, and knowing the differences between the two could help solve some problems or open up some handy options.
The oldest type of email is called POP3. You have an email address that ends with the name of your internet service provider (ISP), such as Bell, Cogeco, or Nexicom, and incoming messages arrive at the ISP’s servers and you download them. Back in the 1990s people used a program called Outlook Express to download their new POP email messages to a computer where the emails could be replied to, stored in folders, or deleted forever. Outlook Express was available in Windows versions from Windows 95 right through Win 7 but was replaced by the very basic Mail program in Win 10. Outlook is still a business-oriented email client included in the Microsoft Office Suite. However, there is an excellent, free, email program called Mozilla Thunderbird (www.thunderbird.net), which looks remarkably similar to Outlook Express. Interestingly, Thunderbird’s motto is “Make Email Easier”.
Hotmail and later Gmail and Yahoo Mail introduced a new type of email called IMAP or webmail. You access your email within a browser window, or by using a mail app on a smartphone or tablet.
With IMAP there’s no software to download, if you move or change ISPs your email address stays the same, and you can access your email from anywhere. The downside is that you must be connected to the internet to get, compose, or send email messages and all your messages are stored on the servers of the webmail company. If you change webmail companies and cancel your account you’ll lose all of the email messages you may have stored over several years.
For a long time you had to weigh the advantages of IMAP and POP and choose one of them. That’s no longer the case. Thunderbird and
Gmail have changed how things are done.
Besides webmail, Gmail can be set to check a POP account, such as the one supplied by your ISP, and display the messages in Gmail and let you reply or store them in folders at Gmail. You can access your POP email from any smartphone or tablet running the Gmail app. Or you can get Gmail to forward any Gmail messages to your POP account and they can be downloaded using Thunderbird, along with messages to your ISP’s email account. You’ll be able to get all of your messages from two email accounts within one program and save them on your computer.
You have to set this up within Gmail on your computer, and not a mobile device. Open Gmail on a computer, click on the little gear icon in the upper right, then Settings, and make the adjustments in Forwarding and POP/IMAP. Gmail has complete instructions and help at its website (https://support.google.com/mail#topic=7065107).
That flexibility also extends to Thunderbird which can be set up to check several email accounts at once.
It will check your POP email as well as your Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo IMAP mail and download the messages to your computer where you can save them for viewing even when offline. You will have all of the advantages of webmail in that you can still use a browser on any computer or the mail app on your smartphone or tablet to access your IMAP messages when away from home, as well as having Thunderbird download and save all your messages on your computer when you get home. Instructions for doing this are at the Thunderbird Support site (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/thunderbird).
Sometimes dealing with the varied choices and settings in email can open up many useful options.