Tech Talks Today
The E-mail Client And Why It’s Useful
Do You Use One?
Why, yes, I do, thank you for asking. Ah, you mean, why am I using an e-mail client instead of the web interface for my e-mail provider. OK, I get it, but the answer is still going to be annoyingly simple. It makes life and work easier.
In all likeliness, people’s views are split between using a desktop client or the web-based one. Both sides have their advantages and disadvantages.
My experience with e-mail clients has been great, so I am going to tell you about that. You can then try it for yourself or ignore me altogether.:)
I’ve been a long… long-time user of 2 products, Mozilla’s Thunderbird (open-source baby) for personal e-mails and Microsoft’s Outlook for work. There are probably hundreds of other e-mail clients that you could use, but after having tested a whole lot of e-mail apps over the years, I have always shortly returned to Thunderbird.
Before making a list, I am going to mention the fact that all the big players in the e-mail business, have and are continuing to add features and quality of life improvements to the web-based versions of their e-mail services.
Yes, you could easily manage your e-mails from your web browser, but if you are more of a desktop power user, you’ll probably want to use a desktop client.
Manage multiple inboxes
It is much easier to manage multiple e-mail addresses from different providers, from a single, centralized tool. You don’t have to worry about several interfaces or multiple tabs, each with its quirks. Everything can be done from within the client, no matter how many inboxes you have. That’s at least true for Thunderbird and Outlook. There are clients for which you have to get a paid version to get this feature.
Offline work
Internet issues or working in airplane mode? No problem. You can go through your e-mails, sort, delete, reply, schedule as you usually do. When you’re back online, everything will quickly sync up.
The backup
It is easy to keep a backup of all your e-mails. Service provider goes down, or maybe even goes out of business, you never know. At least you can keep a local backup of your e-mails and be sure not to lose important data.
Advanced organization tools and filtering
Of course, some of these are included in webmail clients, but you can more easily and more granularly filter and manage actions on e-mails.
Extended customization
You can customize backgrounds, add themes, change views, icons, and so on. A separate thing altogether could be the use of add-ons, which can enhance your experience or further add reasons to use a desktop client. It is worth mentioning that there are a multitude of add-ons for Gmail for example, so, you could enhance the experience somewhat on that as well.
Options and Preferences
Being tools that are tailored to handle and manage e-mails, they typically come with more features. The ability to further enhance them and use them as a general-purpose tool to do your work is a thing that appeals to me. It’s great to have the ability to manage contacts, schedules, and tasks all from your e-mail client. If you start looking up different desktop e-mail clients, you can see what other benefits they offer on top of what you are accustomed to.
In the end, it is a matter of preference. Most of the time, you can choose the easy route and use the native web-based client, but you can give some e-mail clients a trial period and see if it improves your habits.
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