Tricks To Try Out On Thunderbird And SeaMonkey
Open Source For You|January 2018

Learn to use and store email messages offline with Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.

V. Subhash
Tricks To Try Out On Thunderbird And SeaMonkey

In 2004, Google introduced its Gmail service with a 1GB mailbox and free POP access. This was at a time when most people had email accounts with their ISP or had free Web mail accounts with Hotmail or Yahoo. Mailbox storage was limited to measly amounts such as 5MB or 10MB. If you did not regularly purge old messages, then your incoming mail would bounce with the dreaded ‘Inbox full’ error. Hence, it was a standard practice to store email ‘offline’ using an email client. Each year now, a new generation of young people (mostly students) discover the Internet and they start with Web mail straight away. As popular Web mail services integrate online chatting as well, they prefer to use a Web browser rather than a desktop mail client to access email. This is sad because desktop email clients represent one of those rare Internet technologies that can claim to have achieved perfection. This article will bring readers up to speed on Thunderbird, the most popular FOSS email client.

Why use a desktop email client?

With an email client, you store emails offline. After the email application connects to your mail server and downloads new mail, it instructs the server to delete those messages from your mailbox (unless configured otherwise). This has several advantages.

If your account gets hacked, the hacker will not get your archived messages. This also limits the fallout on your other accounts such as those of online banking.

Web mail providers such as Gmail read your messages to display ‘relevant’ advertisements. This is creepy, even if it is software-driven.

Email clients let you read and compose messages offline. A working Net connection is not required. Web mail requires you to log in first.

Web mail providers such as Gmail automatically tell your contacts whether you are online or if your camera is on. Email clients do not do this.

This story is from the January 2018 edition of Open Source For You.

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