By Dana Bronzene
Email clients are absolutely fabulous! For those of you who do not know what they are, here is a quick explanation. An email client is a program that collects your email for you from as many email addresses that you tell it to. This makes it very easy to organize all your emails, find old emails, and even read emails you have already received when you are not online. This program is only on your computer. However, not to worry, a copy of your email will be saved on the server, so you will still be able to see your email from any other computer just like you always do, via Webmail, or Pine, or whatever else you may use.
First, there is the organization aspect. You can view emails from all your different email addresses at the same time. How convenient is that? But, perhaps most important to us students is that they can help you stay under your email quota! How can they do this you ask? Easy! Old emails that you do not want to delete for whatever reason, but you do not necessarily need constant access to (like that email from your ex where he admitted everything was his fault!) can be moved. I mean, you cannot delete that email! But, you probably do not need to read it every day from every lab computer, either. So, what do you do with it? In your client, you can move that email to a local folder. Just like it sounds, emails saved in the local folder are saved locally, on your hard drive. When you do this, the email is now ONLY on your computer, no longer on the server. This way, you still have your email saved somewhere, but it is no longer taking up space on the server, hence not affecting your quota! Fabulous.
Well, there are a few. First, there is Microsoft Outlook. If you have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, then you have Microsoft Office. Outlook is included in the office suite, and its great. I actually use it, have been using it for several years, and have no complaints. It is very customizable, not only in its email settings, but also in its visual and aesthetic settings. It also includes an address book, a calendar program, a to-do list, and a notepad.
However, if you do not have Office, and you do not wish to buy it, Microsoft offers Outlook Express, a free, stripped down version of Outlook. Although it does not offer some of the nifty extra features of Outlook and does not look quite as professional, its email functionality is exactly the same. As a matter of fact, it has one added bonus! There is an add-in that you can download called an attachment stripper. What this does is it removes attachments from emails. This way, you can keep an email without using up all the space that the huge picture your friend attached occupies. This add-in is only available for Outlook Express.
Another option is Mozilla Thunderbird. This is a free download, from the makers of Firefox, which I am sure we all know and love and use religiously. Thunderbird is similar to Outlook Express. It is less customizable and not quite as sexy looking as Outlook, but totally functional and reliable.
If you have a Mac, Mail is pretty much your only option for a client, as all the others I mentioned are only compatible with Windows. It works just the same as the others as far as email goes--and comes with your Mac when you buy it!
For this step, please see Email Info, under "Email Clients" for information on how to configure the client you have chosen. If you are having trouble with a client, do not hesitate to call us! We can help you through setting it up; it should only take about two minutes to set up an email account.
Just to dispel a fear that I have heard voiced, a client will never lose your email! The way it works is that it synchs all the folders of your email account in your client (inbox, drafts, etc) with the corresponding folders on the server (eclipse.barnard.edu, for example). So, email will never get lost, since it is basically putting an identical image on your computer. And, when you send email, it uses the same server as when you send through Webmail or Pine, so your mail will get to where it is supposed to go, not to worry. And, by the way, since a copy is left on the server, you can set up as many clients as you want. So, if you have two computers, maybe a laptop and a desktop, you can set up a client on each computer, and since both of them synch with the server, they will both look exactly the same. Fantastic! I hope this has gotten you interested in the wonderful world of email clients!