Many of us are familiar with emails now as most of us use emails for personal purpose or for work. While majority of e-mail users normally access their emails using a web browser (such as https://gmail.com), there are software which lets you access your email right from the computer without opening a web browser. Such software are called email client software. In this post, we shall see some of the advantages of using Email Client Software.
What is an email client software?
Email client is a software which you install on your computer or smartphone, which enables you to configure one or more email addresses to receive, read, compose and send emails through the desktop interface rather than through a web browser. It provides a central interface for receiving, composing and sending emails of all configured email address(s).
Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird (Free) are some email client software.
- It is a software which is installed on your computer to manage email accounts.
- You can add multiple email accounts – personal email, work email, email for your business etc. all in one software.
- You can manage multiple email accounts and manage them from the single software.
- You can access emails already downloaded even without internet.
What are the advantages of using Email Client Software?
Here are some of the advantages of using e-mail client software instead of Webmail.
- Add multiple email accounts and manage all the accounts centrally- no need to login to each of the account on web browsers every time you need to check your emails. If you use multiple email accounts, this is a huge time saver.
- Access emails without internet – past emails (already downloaded emails) can be accessed even when there is not internet. Whereas, if you are using the web based email, you always need internet to access your emails. This is one of the biggest advantage of using email client software.
- No need to enter password again and again to access email. Email client software allows saving passwords.
- Email client have shared inbox where you can see all the incoming emails from different accounts all in one place. No need to switch / login to different email accounts to check emails.
- Consistent user interface – The desktop interface is the same for all of my email accounts. With webmail, the interface will be different for each separate email service.
- Email clients are faster.
- You can use keyboard shortcuts to do tasks faster.
- You can add useful add-ons to increase functionality -depending on the features provided by the software.
- Sort and search emails – sort feature is generally not available on web based emails.
- Emails downloaded to the computer stays on your computer. Even if the email service provider goes out of business (though not likely) or there is outage or your account is deleted from their server, you still have the old emails already downloaded.
- You can even backup the entire email account or some of the emails to hard drive easily if required.
- Email client software allows you to configure the look and feel of the interface much more than your webmail interfaces would allow.
Web-based mail allows you to access your email via a web browser.
The most popular examples are:
Gmail, Yahoo
If you only operate an single email address and don’t use it that often, then may be you need not use email clients. You can access the email using the email’s app on your smartphone and use the web browser to access your email when you are on your computer.