Email and Internet

by Alden Smith

Many people buy a computer for the use of communicating with family and friends. It is especially nice for someone who is disabled or home bound to be able to keep in touch with the outside world. Countless friends and relationships have been established through this medium. With gas prices and the economy the way it is today, it is little wonder that people are turning to this medium. The number of email clients and browsing platforms that are available today can be rather confusing. Although much of it is personal choice, there are advantages and disadvantages to all of them. In this article we will discuss email and internet programs, and teach you a bit about each.

What Is Available

An email client is an application used to send and receive email. Typically, it comes bundled with the operating system that comes with your computer. With Windows, you have Outlook Express on windows running XP, and Mail For Vista on the new Vista operating system. With Macintosh, you get Mail for Leopard. All of these default email clients work well, because they were designed for the application driving them. You do not, however, have to be satisfied with a default email program.

Here is a list of current email clients for both Windows and Mac:

Thunderbird - an open source email client by Mozilla.
This client is well received and highly customizable,
With plenty of filters, a clean interface, and the
ability to receive email, RSS feeds, and news.
Eudora is a powerful, flexible and efficient email
that deals with spam efficiently. It is considered to be
very good in terms of filtering and folder control.
Pegasus is considered to be the best email client
for Windows. Some people complain about the
accessibility of functions in the interface.

Along with these top 3 email clients, there are many free email accounts to use on the internet. Google, the large internet search engine, has G Mail, which is a very good system to use if you travel, or if you plan on running a small business from your home. Also available is MSN's Hotmail, which is very popular. Yahoo, the internet search engine, has a good email program, and you can access it from your Yahoo home page.

Internet Access

Operating systems come with an internet browser that allows you to access the web. Windows has had Internet Explorer for years, and there has been some controversy about this program being bundled with the operating system, because it cannot be uninstalled. IE works well for casual browsing and searches. The
application has a lot of built in security features that help keep you out of trouble by identifying possible malicious or unsafe sites.

Mac users have Safari 3, and excellent, easy to use web browser with many new features that make it a good experience surfing the web. Featuring tabbed browsing, a one click bookmark system, and the ability to drag and drop a page onto your desktop makes it a real winner for the person doing research for school papers and documents. Safari reports that it executes JavaScript, a script used in certain aspects of running a site, as 3 times faster than IE. Safari is now available for Windows.

A free, open source and powerful web browser can be had in FireFox by Mozilla. A recent report by w3schools.com shows that 36.5% of the people visiting their site were using FireFox. FireFox has grown rapidly in popularity in the past few years, gaining a market share that should soon rival MS Internet Explorer. It is preferred by many who research and like the ability to have many pages open at once in tabs. It has the full support of the open source community, making it an incredibly advanced web browser that costs you nothing to use.

Regardless of your choice, use what works the best for you. Be aware that there are a lot of very good email clients and internet browsers available, and almost all are free, especially the really good ones. It is a good idea to first try your default system until you find out that it just doesn't meet your needs. In many cases, people who just use the internet for email and casual browsing will not have a need for other applications. Whatever you decide, remember that there is a lot of good things out there.