Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
So my questions:
1) Do you think I need an email client?
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I'll admit bias here.
Once upon a time, I downloaded email via POP and read it in Outlook. I
could have used the then free MS Outlook Express (which is no longer offered), but I needed compatibility with the office, where Outlook was a mainstay, and I needed more powerful mail filtering than OE offered. OE was IF <condition> DO <action>, but I needed more. I got (and still get) a
lot of email, and needed to be able to rice, slice and dice it in ways OE could not.
(At the office, we
lived in Outlook's shared calendar, which was another reason to run it at home too. The calendar function was likely more important than the email function. )
Back when Gmail was still invitational beta, a chap in a mailing list I'm on worked for Google, and offered Gmail invites. I took one. It literally changed my life.
One issue I encountered in Outlook was that it got
really confused when the mailbox.pst file where it stored downloaded mail grew over 2GB. (It was a 32 bit pointer problem.) Symptoms were new mail not getting added, and duplicates of existing mail multiplying like cockroaches.
Another issue, not Outlook specific, was that my ISP offered a rather small Inbox on their server. (IIRC, I got 5MB of space.) If I didn't DL mail
every day and delete it from the server, the Inbox would fill up, and new incoming mail would bounce.
I moved to Gmail, and those problems went away. Gmail polled my ISP account (and several others), and all mail appeared in my Gmail Inbox. Gmail offered a constantly increasing amount of storage space (which has now settled at 15GB for basic free accounts.)
I made Gmail my primary email address, everything got sent to it, and I stopped caring about the size of my ISP's Inbox, because mail no longer went there. My mail resides on Google's servers, and I read and reply in my browser. I can do that from wherever I happen to have a current browser and broadband access. I don't need local copies stored on my machine (and lost if there's a hardware failure.)
My Gmail mailstore is a database, searchable via standard Google routines. I can use labels and filters to classify mail. Incoming mail is processed by filters, which apply labels. One of the things that most filters do is automatically label and Archive received mail. Mail that is Archived does not appear in my Inbox. Instead, a list of labels appears on the left side of my Gmail window. Labels applied to mail that has not been read appear there. To read it, I click on the label, and all mail with that label applied appears in the window. It acts like Folders in Outlook, with a critical difference: more than one label can be applied to an email, so the
same email can appear under more than one label (and in more than one virtual folder.)
In essence, labels are arbitrary index keys I can use to query the mail database.
Gmail also offers the best spam filtering I've ever seen. I no longer
care about spam. Perhaps one new spam message appears in my Inbox every two weeks, if that. Click Report Spam, and I don't see it
again. It's not perfect, so I do check what got labeled Spam and redirect false positives, but it works very well.
And after switching to Gmail, I
stopped running A/V software on the Windows side. I had been using Symantec Corporate, via an employer site license. The version I was running reached end of life, and I no longer worked for that employer , so a new version would be on my dime. I asked "Do I
need to run A/V?", and concluded I didn't. Viruses and malware are infections. Infections have vectors by which they enter the host. Ward the vector, and block the infection.
The principle vector for viruses was email. All Symantec had ever found was "false positives". My Gmail mailstore resides on Gmail's servers. I read and reply in my browser. Gmail implements viewers for most common attachments, so I can open and see them in my browser. None of it ever actually reaches my machine. I stopped running A/V.
And Google is fanatic about security, so I do
not worry about getting hacked.
Quote:
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2) If yes, do I need to get their Outlook? (Couldn't I get a free one like Thunderbird?)
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Outlook is a Microsoft product, part of MS Office. You
can't use Outlook because Office is not available for Linux. You
could use Thunderbird, but the question is whether you need to.
From where I sit, the answer is no, but as mentioned, I'm biased. See above about why.
I have Thunderbird here, but
don't use it for email. It's a newsreader as well as email client, and I still follow some newsgroups.
______
Dennis