Email is such an important thing these days, that its vital to have a great system going. I recommend using Gmail/Google Apps, but not using their Web-Based Interface. The web-interfaces for all email clients are vastly inferior to the desktop email clients, such as Thunderbird and Outlook. Use IMAP, instead of POP3, to sync your desktop client.

Google Apps

For business users or people with their own domain names, I recommend using Google Apps which is basically just Gmail with added ability of using your own domain name and managing users and accounts for that domain. We have been using that for our business for several years and have been really happy with it. Google Apps is free, but if you need over 7GB of email storage then you will have to pay $50 per user per year for 25 GB of email storage.

Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great replacement for Outlook and I highly recommend it for being a really fast IMAP client and lots of plug-ins. I especially recommend it if you are one of those unfortunate people who have had to deal with Outlook’s corrupted data files (and I am sure that any who has done Network Administration long enough has).

Backup

If you use IMAP to sync your desktop email client, then you really don’t have a local backup of your emails because if they are somehow deleted of the email server, then your email client will also remove them automatically. So its a good idea to backup your emails using the POP3 protocol and another instance of a desktop email client. You can schedule for it to open automatically on a nightly schedule, so you don’t even have to worry about forgetting to backup the emails manually.

by Dmitriy Zasyatkin

Psst… Dmitriy Zasyatkin hopes you enjoyed learning about Email, and if you learned something new today, then please leave a comment.