super-charge your email

Written by Nicholas Francis on April 27, 2007 – 4:01 am -

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These days, email has proved to be one of the fastest, versatile
yet economical modes of communication. With uses ranging from
delivery of messages to near and dear ones, sending SMSs, posting
blogs,transferring/archiving files,subscribing e-newsletters and e-zines etc
at almost no cost, it has penetrated the lives of common mass at
amazing rate.As much as 92% of the Internet traffic is contributed
by emails and proves its usefulness in our daily life.
As the competition among the free email service
providers reach its pinnacle, the users have benefited a lot
with magnificent storage spaces, large attachment supports, free
POP/IMAP/SMTP support and host of other features.In this context,
inboxes are likely to contain thousands of mails.Managing the
e-correspondence at this time may seem to be a daunting task.
However, we can use suitable tools and their features to manage
and use emails efficiently:
1) Use of POP/IMAP/SMTP service:
To send and receive emails faster, we can use mail clients
like Mozilla Thunderbird, MS-Outlook, Eudora etc with number
of e-mail service providers: Gmail, AOL Free webmail(AIM) and even
Hotmail, Yahoo etc. For that, we need to enable POP/SMTP service
at the settings/options panel of the service provider and then
configure the server/port settings in the mail client. The POP/IMAP
service enables us to receive mails from the mail server whereas
the SMTP service enables us to relay(send) messages to the destination.
For Gmail,the POP setting should be : pop.gmail.com(SSL enabled, port: 995)
whereas SMTP setting should be :smtp.gmail.com(SSL/TLS enabled, port: 587)
For Yahoo, Hotmail, we are required to use third party tools like YPOP
and Hotmail Popper respectively. Using this feature has several merits
over Webmail versions that people commonly use such as: faster receive/
delivery of mails.As there is no need to load all those flashy ads,
slow-loading graphics etc. E-mails can be written and stored in 'Unsent
Messages' or
'Outbox' folders using mail clients while we are off-line. Once we are
connected
to the Internet, all those saved mails can be sent instantaneously.The
mail formats
that we use often can be saved in 'Drafts' folder and re-use them later.
As all
the incoming and outgoing messages are available for off-line use, we
can refer to
them whenever we wish.

2)Multiple accounts and password management: Free and powerful mail
client like Thunderbird can be used to handle multiple email accounts.
It supports a single (also called 'Global') inbox for many email accounts.
That means messages from Gmail, Yahoo etc can be received in the same
folder.
All we need to do is create server settings for each account and provide
authentication information such as username, password etc for them.
After that, the client will intelligently handle those information saving us
from remembering lots of usernames, passwords.For added protection, we can
encode the stored passwords using a master password.No more cramming up
all those passwords..

3) Message filters and labelling: With our inboxes flooded with numerous
mails
from different people and organizations, it becomes a challenge for us to
store and manage them. As email service providers such as
Mail2world(www.mail2world.com),
30Gigs(www.30gigs.com), AOL Webmail,Gmail provide us with unlimited,
30GB, 2GB and >2.5GB
storage respectively, searching for particular mail in the archive can
be just like
searching for needle in a haystack. It becomes mandatory to label or
flag the messages
categorically or to store them in the separate folders accordingly.
Gmail allows us
to create different labels like 'work', 'friends','education' etc and
apply them to related
group of mails so that they can be retrieved later. Moreover, important
messages can be
flagged /starred.The 'search mails' option(that permits searching by
Subject, Sender, Keywords)
provided by Yahoo, Gmail and mail clients likewise proves to be great
boon to users.Click
a label and presto! there is the mail you received years ago and that
you yourself have
forgotten.

4)Junk mail controls: Carelessness in disclosing email addresses to the
outer world,
signing up for e-newsletters, accounts etc in untrusted sites etc make
us target to
all those embarrassing spams, Nigerian emails etc.Such rubbishes can be
tackled with intelligent
junk mail controls available in mail clients. The control automatically
labels the suspected messages
as junk. For first few uses, we need to monitor and train the control
and later, it will act
as the trusted guard to all those useless mails.

5)Enabling email virus scanners: Emails are often considered responsible
for widespread
distribution of viruses and other malwares usually in the form of
attachments.In this regards,
it is wise to enable automatic email virus scanning option generally
provided in leading anti-virus
solutions like Norton, Trend Micro's Pc-Cillin, AVG etc. Also the virus
database(signatures) must
to be updated regularly in such softwares.

6)Use of RSS/Atom feeds: Now, major web/blog sites provide their
contents in summarized/syndicated(XML)
form.Gmail and Mail client like Thunderbird can be used to subscribe to
such feeds and read their contents.
Whenever updated contents become available, they will be automatically
rushed to us. No more
moving around different sites to gather information or news
headlines..they will be at your finger-tips.

7)Extending to other uses: There are some really useful extensions
available to Thunderbird mail application
such as Calendar(for keeping track of appointments, daily events), Fox
clock(clock representing
different time-zones), FoxyTunes(for controlling media players)and some
cool themes(skins) to
change the look and feel of the application.