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Webmail vs Desktop Mail

While a personal connection still trumps any other type of communication, email is definitely a necessary tool for any business.  With it one can share not only ideas but images, audio and video as well.  When two business people need to connect quickly and share data they do it with email.

Working people send an average of 38 emails a day and receive an average of 93 according to Techcrunchies.com. 

There are three types of email clients available that most people will be familiar with:

  1. desktop
  2. web-based
  3. a combination of the two

Desktop Email Clients

Desktop clients like Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Windows Mail are installed to your computer and, when you are connected to the internet, retrieve your email from the internet at set intervals throughout the day.  You are free to read and respond to those emails even if you are not online – you only have to be online to send and receive the mail.

Pros

 Cons
  • content exists locally on your computer
  • once the emails download, navigating through them can be quick
  • managing large numbers of email is easier on a desktop client
  • difficult to share email data between machines 
  • computer hard drive space is consumed
  • large amounts of email can really slow down a computer

Web-based Email Clients

Web-based clients like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc… reside on a machine or machines somewhere else in the world and operate in real-time.  This means that when you view your Hotmail inbox you see exactly all the mail that is available for you to read or respond to – you are not required to retrieve the mail.  This type of email system is only available to you when you are online – if your internet connection goes down for any reason you will need to wait until it resumes before you can go back and read/respond to your email.

Pros

 Cons
  • easy access to all email all the time, anywhere there is an internet connection
  • consumes no local hard drive space
  • Google especially has some the most aggressive, accurate spam filters available
  • speed of use is limited by speed of internet connection 
  • managing many emails can be cumbersome
  • large amounts of email can really slow down a computer

A Combination of the Two

Why not have your cake and eat it too?  A very common solution to the desktop vs. online email solution issue is to combine them.  By setting up your email through Google (gmail) you can benefit from the excellent spam filters and accessibility of an online system but you can also retrieve your email using your desktop email client.  If you set up your account using IMAP then you won’t have to read, respond, delete the same email each time you check on a different machine. (Note: email can be sent/retrieved via POP or IMAP). 
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