by Michael Raymond

Created on: August 16, 2011   Last Updated: October 04, 2011

Email used to be easy. Outside of maintaining the email addresses for friends and relatives there was not much involved in keeping up with your inbox. SPAM was merely a small annoyance, not the overwhelming flood that it is today.

Now, it seems that attempting to keep your email organized can be a futile effort at best and a major headache at worst. Most of us have at least one email address for personal and another for work related communications. Every site we participate on requires an email address to join. Sometimes, without our knowledge, our email address is shared with other companies that are partnered with sites we have become members of. You can't place an online order without providing a valid email address. The amount of SPAM we are subject to on any given day can easily surpass the valid pieces of communication we must read and respond to. It can be a daunting task to filter the signal from all of the noise.

There are a number of considerations to discuss prior to determining what is the best software for you to manage your email. Some of the questions that should be answered are:

* What operating system does your computer use?
* How many email addresses do you check?
* How much mail do you prefer to keep?
* How much technical expertise do you have?

Depending upon your circumstances and your priorities, an email program - or client as they are called in the technical jargon - that does not comply with your answers to the above questions could make something as simple as email into a major point of frustration.

Any of the major email clients - Thunderbird, Opera, Outlook, Windows Live, Mac Mail among them - will do a wonderful job of retrieving your email and storing it for you. However, there are a couple of issues to be aware of with some of these email clients. Outlook is generally part of the Microsoft Office Suite and is not free. Mac Mail is included with the Macintosh operating system, and thus, only works on a Mac.

Outlook, because of its integration with Microsoft Office, provides the richest feature set. It provides built in calendar and scheduling access, and is an excellent choice in an office setting where collaboration may be important.

Thunderbird is the most extensible, the most customizable. Through the use of themes available on the Mozilla web site, you can change the entire appearance of the user interface. There are a large number of add-ons that will increase the functionality, including a calendar and scheduling add-on that rivals

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>