[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Dennis. That was quite an endorsement for Gmail. So the Godaddy guy, who said gmail could be easily hacked, was wrong?

I'll be polite and not say "He was lying through his teeth", and leave it at "Yeah, he's wrong." He's trying to sell you something. You question whether you need it. So do I.

I haver never heard of Gmail being successfully hacked. Yahoo and AOL, on the other hand, are very different matters.

Gmail is set for two factor authentication, with a very non-obvious password. The password is stored by my browser, and entered automatically. Communication with Gmail is via https, so the session to it is encrypted. I am not concerned about my password being sniffed, nor my account being hacked.

(And as a rule, I do not consider email secure technology. In general, I don't say things in email that would give me heartburn if seen by third parties. Unless you are me, reading my email will be mystifying or profoundly boring, but you won't learn anything about me I'm concerned with keeping private. If it's that sensitive, that's what things like GPG are for, but I have yet to have a reason to use GPG.)

I have Gmail for my personal email and yeah, it's great. I have five or six email accounts (mostly to see what the emails I send look like on other email accounts) and feel no need for a client to bring them together in one place. My only concern was if the client (in this case, let's say Thunderbird) was more secure than the Microsoft Outlook 365 Essentials that I now have?

I don't understand why you need a client at all.

Are you downloading mail to a local mailstore? Why?

I have an assortment of accounts. Gmail polls them. Mail from them appears in Gmail. Gmail can be set to label them based on origin. I don't. It can set so replies to mail from polled accounts appear to come from the account that was polled. I do.

I could, but haven't, set up separate Gmail accounts for specific purposes. Thus far, I haven't needed to.

I'm perfectly content with my mail living on Google's servers. I have no need for local copies.

And btw the Godaddy rep said the Essentials (since it's paid) has better security than Gmail.

Now I'll stop being polite. He's so full of it his eyeballs should turn brown. There are two possibilities - either he's dreadfully ignorant, and actually believes what he's saying, or he knows better and he's lying and preying on your ignorance to sell you something. Which it is doesn't matter. Either would be cause for me to stop dealing with GoDaddy.

Again, the rep kept stressing that the continual putting in of the password was what made regular webmail accounts so much more vulnerable than email clients.

And what does he think happens when an email client communicates with a server? Email servers want authentication, to prove you are the person authorized to access that email. They want a user id and a password. You create the account in the email client when you set it up. The client sends the user id and password as part of the negotiation when you check for email on the server. This is different from webmail how, exactly?

The practical difference between using a client and webmail is where the mail is when you access and read it.

So do you think I'm okay with the Essentials (it would seem so) or would I be safer with Thunderbird?

I don't understand why you need Essentials. (I haven't used it, and can't talk about how secure it is relative to Thunderbird.)

For that matter, I don't understand why you need GoDaddy. What do they provide for you?
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Dennis