About Email

By Wayne Maruna

Nearly everyone with a computer, tablet, or phone uses email.  Let’s talk about email a bit and understand some terms and options.

            There are two primary ways we interact with email:  either through ‘webmail’ using a browser interface (Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, etc.) or through what is called an email ‘client’ which is just a specialized computer application. I’ve never liked the term ‘email client’, as it makes more sense to me to just call it an email program or application.

 Examples of ‘email clients’ include Microsoft Outlook (included with some versions of Microsoft Office), Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows 10’s built-in Windows Mail, and Apple’s email program built into MacOS.  Some familiar but now-defunct email clients include Outlook Express, Eudora, and Windows Live Mail.   People who migrated their PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10 may still be able to run Windows Live Mail, but it can no longer be downloaded or installed.

With webmail, your browser creates the ‘front end’ or interface by which you interact with the provider’s mail servers.  All emails and contacts remain on the servers unless you delete them.   You can perform email actions with your laptop, log out, then log back in again from your desktop and the server content will be just as you left it with the laptop.  Perhaps the biggest potential downside to webmail is that you have to have a functioning internet connection.  Additionally, the provider may set a limit on the amount of space your emails and attachments take up, though these are typically quite high.  Google’s Gmail, for example, gives you 15GB of free space, which includes any space used in your Google Drive (cloud storage space).  I’ve read that Yahoo allows users a full terabyte of space (1,000 GBs)! So even packrats are unlikely to fill their space any time soon.  Of course, this does mean that you rely on the provider to protect and backup your email.  My guess is that they do a much better job of it than most home users.

            There was a time when I hated Webmail, but I’ve done a complete about-face in the last couple of years and use Webmail exclusively on my PCs.  I think the biggest reason for choosing webmail is that when one acquires a new system, or wipes out their old hard drive to reload Windows afresh, resetting up email can be a royal pain in terms of transferring over old emails and contacts. With webmail, the emails are not really on your device, they are on the provider’s servers. So all one has to do is log into the webmail account and everything is still right there! Similarly when someone asks me to set up a new PC, I ask what they use for email.  If they tell me it is Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail or even AOL, I know my job just became a lot easier and the client’s cost will be lower.

            The biggest reason for using an email ‘client’, I suspect, is familiarity that goes back to the days of dial-up connections, when a user would dial up, listen to the modem screech, log in, retrieve their messages into a desktop program, and disconnect.  Then they could read their messages at leisure, compose their messages when they wanted, and dial back in to transfer those outgoing messages.  Boy, am I glad those days are behind us.  

            There are two ways to set up an email client, and these involve the choice of ‘protocol’ by which the client interacts with the servers.  A protocol is a set of rules or procedures that govern communications between devices over a network.  You can set up an email account in the client using either POP3 or IMAP.  (Getting a little deep here, huh?) POP3 stands for Post Office Protocol and IMAP stands for Internet Messaging Access Protocol. The gist of the difference is that with POP3, email is actually downloaded to your computer and, absent any intervening settings, deleted from the server. That last part is significant because a carrier like Suddenlink imposes a fairly low limit on email server space, around 2GB for the entire account which is shared by family members.  Once downloaded to your PC, the only limit on space is the size of your hard drive(s).  The downside to POP3 is that once you download a message to your machine, it is gone from the server (barring settings changes), so that message is only available through that one device’s email client.

            If the email client is set up with the IMAP protocol, the result is quite similar to using webmail.  The emails reside on the provider’s server, and the email client essentially becomes a lens through which you can interact with the servers.  Like with webmail, any changes made to messages are viewed as synced among your devices.  The main reason I can see for using IMAP with an email client versus webmail is if you just hate the provider’s webmail interface.

            There is a third protocol called MAPI (messaging application interface) but you’re only likely to encounter that in a corporate environment.

            All the above protocols are for inbound mail.  For outbound, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used regardless of inbound protocol.