Electronic mail is one of the oldest Internet protocols, dating back to 1971, and even now there are folks who use no Internet services other than email. You can exchange email with any Internet user.
POP mail, the style of email discussed on this page, is the original style of PC-based Internet email. Your mail messages accumulate on a mail server at your ISP, and you use an email client, which is software installed on your PC, to connect to the ISP mail server and retrieve, read, store, and respond to your mail.
Web mail is the main alternative to POP mail. Web mail is a type of usually advertising-supported free email service, which uses dynamic Web pages and your Web browser, or any Web browser anywhere, to create your email client on-the-fly. Your mail is stored on their server, and no separate email program installed on your PC is required. For more see my Web mail page in this section.
You probably have ISP-provided remote Web access to your POP-mail account, depending on the ISP you selected. See the ISP Web-mail section of my Free email page (under Internet access) for more on that.
The Opera, Netscape, and SeaMonkey Web browsers are part of a suite of programs which also includes a POP-mail client, which shares interface features and themes, support, and update mechanisms with the browser. Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird download separately but are designed to work together in a similar way. Using Web browser and POP-mail clients from the same set of products has obvious advantages.
Try to write your emails in inverted pyramids, as newspaper people are taught: start with the conclusion or main idea, follow immediately with the main supporting points, then supply the background detail. Both in online and newspaper content, the idea is that an impatient reader can quit at any time and still have gotten the high points of the item.*
See my Spam defense page for information on how to deal with the spam email problem.
You usually can create folders inside your mail program, to help you organize your mail, and usually there's some form of address book to capture and keep track of frequently-used email addresses. Generally there's some way to define a list of addressees as a mail group in your mail program, so you can send mail to the whole group in one step. There are also special-interest mailing lists that use email. You send email to subscribe to a mailing list, and thereafter you automatically receive periodic messages that are sent to all subscribers; it's similar to subscribing to a magazine.
Usually you can "attach" one or more binary files to a mail message, and have them delivered along with the message. Since Internet email is text-based, the attached files are encoded as text for transmission. Attachments were developed after the Internet mail system was first set up, and were problematical for a year or so; different clients sometimes used incompatible coding schemes for attachments. Some email clients didn't support attachments at all, requiring use of a separate program to decode and recover them; I had to do that with the first email attachment I ever received, in 1994. Mail clients are standardized on MIME encoding for attachments now, and things usually work smoothly.
In 1997 developers added some interesting new protocols to email clients:
If you've lately taken to cursing at your current e-mail program, then I suggest you give Thunderbird a try. It's the best thing to happen to e-mail in a long time. Arik Hesseldahl, Forbes, 2/7/05
Thunderbird is the open-source, cross-platform, freeware email client offered along with the Web browser Mozilla Firefox, a user-friendly alternative to Outlook. Thunderbird has junk-mail tools, security features including S/MIME, optional HTML formatting, search and saved searches, message filtering, import/export tools, multiple account support, and is customizable and extendable. Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Also available is Thunderbird Portable, a version modified to run politely from a USB flash drive, and part of a system of portable applications and two menu/launcher choices; for more about this see my mobile computing pages.
Thunderbird has a nice simple interface, and shares the same support and add-ons (extensions and themes) interfaces as Firefox, which obviously makes things easy if that's what you're using.
Version 2.0.0.4 download size is 6.4MB. Firefox and Thunderbird versions seem to be developed and released somewhat in synch; if you use both, don't forget to watch for a new version of Thunderbird a few weeks after a Firefox release.
To set an automatic email signature in Thunderbird:
If you later decide to change your signature, you can just edit the text file, without changing where it's saved. If you're supporting POP-mail accounts for multiple users on one PC, you'll want to go to the Manage Identities button on the same dialog pane and set a different signature for each account.
The only gripe I have about Thunderbird is the name is too long: it looks like "Thunder..." on a Desktop shortcut label when it's not selected.
Eudora was my favorite POP-mail client for years, although I did use Pegasus for a while, and people I work for made me use Outlook at gunpoint from time to time, and still do. Of course, now I use free Web-mail, so I don't have to think much about POP clients any more, at least for myself.
In October 2006 Qualcomm announced that future versions of Eudora will be "based upon the same technology platform" as open-source Mozilla Thunderbird. This is now a Mozilla project with code name Penelope in the form of an Thunderbird extension. Penelope will essentially convert Thunderbird into the new incarnation of Eudora, eventually with features like stationery familiar to longtime Eudora users. The Penelope project is still in beta as of second quarter 2009.
Opera Mail along with the Opera Web browser was a logical choice for older slower hardware for years, since the Opera stuff is all designed to be small and fast, both to download and to run. Opera version 7 introduced a new database-based mail client called M2, and I hear complaints about it. Your mileage may vary. Opera plus Thunderbird (see section above) or Opera plus the free Web-mail service of your choice would be reasonable alternatives for fans of the Opera browser.
The Opera Web browser appears never to have had a global usage share greater than 2%. Opera announced in 2005 they were dropping the ad banner and licensing fee for the Opera 8.50+ suite in favor of free downloads and income from search revenues including their deal with Google. For more about the Opera browser and other browsers, see my Web browsers and Browser Wars pages in this section.
Outlook is the full-featured POP-mail client that comes with Microsoft Office. In fact some would say it has too many features. I have even been known to use the phrase galloping featuritis. Outlook's complexity and intimidation factor may be a major contributor to the information overload phenomenon corporate people talk so much about.*
Outlook Express is a limited-feature, training-wheels sort of POP client, that comes with Microsoft Windows. The idea seems to be that a PC delivered with Windows installed will at least have something on it already Grandma can do a little email with, without having to buy anything else first, or figure out any propeller-head download stuff. If you're not Grandma, you'll want to get something else: some of the limitations of Outlook Express are ones you're likely to trip over. I think Outlook support got a lot of calls about this.
Pegasus is a sophisticated donationware (formerly freeware) email client, that's been around since the early 1990's. Pegasus is designed to be able to handle both Internet email and LAN based email. The last time I tried it (1990's) Pegasus was not as easy to deal with as Eudora.
The Linux version of Thunderbird is an obvious choice for many Linux users. There's also an interesting user-friendly X windows email client called Evolution.
Linux users can also choose a text-mode (no graphics) Unix mail program called Pine, from the University of Washington. I used pine with a Unix shell account for fifteen months, before I graduated to PPP/Winsock, and I found it quite satisfactory. It's menu-driven, easy to use, includes an address book and mail "folders," supports attachments, and even comes with its own user-friendly text editor called pico. Pine calls pico whenever you edit mail, but you can also run pico as a separate stand-alone text editor, and I guarantee you it's easier to learn than vi or emacs or whatever. You can get pine from an ftp site at U of Washington.
There's also Mutt, a freeware text-based Unix mail client, which seems to have had some popularity at one time. Mutt and Pine are both based on Elm, an older text-based Unix mail client.
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