Using Email Clients: Pros and Cons

Email clients, like Outlook Express, can be helpful, quick, and easy, but they can also cause problems or be unsuitable for your needs. Here are a few reasons why you may prefer using an email client:

The Pros

Email clients limits your online time. An email client is beneficial to get what you need and disconnect from the Internet more quickly. You can quickly download new messages and send composed messages, usually in a few minutes. The messages are then available offline to read at your leisure, compose replies to them, organize in folders, or delete. This is especially appealing to dial-up users who don't want to tie up the phone line.

Email clients avoid disconnect issues. If you check messages on your server's website, you have to be online to open, read, compose, delete, and organize emails. On a dial-up connection, you could get disconnected for reaching a session or idle time limit. Furthermore, your modem could suddenly drop the connection from line noise or other problems. This would cause the email you just composed to be lost. On an email client, everything is saved on your computer, so you won't lose anything by getting disconnected.

Email clients save your contacts. Your email client saves your contacts to your computer instead of the server who provides your email. If you use your provider's website for email, you will immediately lose emails and contacts if you switch providers or your account is otherwise terminated.

Email clients are especially helpful if you don't have a constant connection, or if you work on only one computer. Here are a few reasons why people prefer mail websites or can't use email clients:

The Cons

Email clients have problems downloading large emails. A picture or attachment greatly increases an email's size. Downloading these messages takes much longer, and could result in a timeout error. This means that one large email can prevent all the other emails from loading. Checking messages directly from a website allows you to view emails without downloading all of them first. You can view all your messages, then download the attachments at any time.

Email clients are restricted to one computer. If you use a more than one computer to check and compose messages, email clients are a hassle. For example, if you want to access your email from work, you will not have access to everything saved on the email client at home-contacts, folders, drafts, or previously downloaded messages. If you download new messages to an email client at work, they will be completely inaccessible to your home computer. Suppose to avoid this, you specify to download only a copy of your new messages, so you can download them to both computers. Then you have to access the website anyway to delete the messages to avoid downloading the same messages repeatedly.

Email clients can have connection and security issues. A simple set up error could prevent downloads. You will get a connection error if use the wrong server addresses, connection settings, and port settings. If you switch connections, you would have to change your settings again. Your antivirus program may block your email client from receiving messages for no apparent reason. Also, all messages flagged as spam by your email provider will not download to your client, so you could be missing an email because it was accidentally marked as spam. These issues would all be avoided by directly accessing your email online.

If you prefer to use email clients and you get an error sending or recieving messages, be sure you are connected and able to view webpages. You may need to contact your ISP to make sure you have the correct settings and check for large incoming messages.