Pop goes the Webmail

Back in the early days of the Net in India, you had a TCP/IP account from VSNL (which was the only game in town for all practical purposes) and you used Outlook Express or Netscape Mail to download your mail using the POP3 protocol. Then the Webmail brotherhood came along. First, there was Hotmail, then RocketMail, then Yahoo!; Yahoo! ate up RocketMail and finally, Gmail.

Over the years, Webmail has cornered the market for all personal mail. Heck, many small businesses use Webmail for official purposes. The only problem with Webmail is that it is only available when you are online. POP3 access to Webmail accounts has been available over the years but support has been spotty.

Live Mail is a user-friendly email client which makes configuring offline access to your Hotmail account a no-brainer

Still in beta, ZimbraDesktop offers easy access to your Yahoo! mail account even when offline

Firefox's sibling is a full-featured mail client that makes it easy to configure your Gmail account for POP access

If you are on Hotmail or as its known nowadays, Windows Live Hotmail, then Windows Live Mail gives you POP3 access to your Webmail. If you are a Gmail aficionado, then Thunderbird is your best bet, it even has a Gmail option under the New Accou nt Wizard. You will need to tweak the settings a bit though. Gmail Help has decent instructions on doing so. Yahoo! is the most troublesome of the Big Three. There is an Open Source option called Yahoo! POPs or YPOPs that simulates a Webmail session and downloads mail and serves it up to your POP client but it doesn’t work very well. Thankfully, there is another option. Yahoo! acquired a company called Zimbra which offers a Desktop client which supports Yahoo! Mail (paid accounts have always supported POP3 access, free accounts not so much).

While we’re on the topic, POP3 clients have got better over the years. Windows Live Mail is a refurbished Outlook Express. You can download it from http://get.live.com where you can get the Windows Live installer and download the Mail client as well as an excellent blogging product called Windows Live Writer (WLW) among others. BTW, read the Windows Live Installer screen options carefully. The default options will replace your default search with Live Search and make MSN your home page. I prefer to do my searching with Google and keep a blank home page but if you prefer the above choices, it’s your call. Configuring Hotmail with Windows Live Mail involves entering your email ID and that’s about it. It fills in the blanks for your and no tweaking is required. This is the nearest thing to a no-brainer if you’re looking for free POP3 mail access.

Thunderbird 2.0 is damn good at what it does. It’s full featured, supports Gmail out-of-the-box (the SMTP settings need to be tweaked to use SSL instead of TLS and you need to affix ‘recent:’ without the quotes in front of your e-mail ID but Gmail support is miles better than in any other client) and has tons of plugins that add value. You can get it at mozilla.org/thunderbird. For those unfamiliar with Thunderbird, I’m sure that most of you are using or are at least aware of Firefox. Well, Thunderbird is the e-mail counterpart to Firefox and it is also from the Mozilla.org stable. You can get add ons for the software at http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/.

Zimbra Desktop (http://www.zimbra.com/products /desktop_download.html) is a biggish download (47 MB). You’ll need a broadband connection to get it. Zimbra Desktop is still in beta; however, there do not seem to be any show stopping bugs in it. I was able to configure my Yahoo! account and synchronize my mail quite easily. As far as I could make out, this is not a POP3 client. However, it does download your mail (the Inbox and Sent folders by default; you can add other folders if required) and you can backup or restore downloaded mail. Being Java-based, I found Zimbra Desktop a tad sluggish and ugly compared to the polished Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird. Still, it’s the only game in town if you want reliable offline access to your free Yahoo! mail account.

Therefore, as we have seen, there’s no reason to stick to your browser for using a Webmail account unless you’re accessing mail at a cybercafé. POP3 access has several advantages not the least of which is that using any of the big three Webmail sites in a browser can lead to your machine grinding on account of memory utilization shooting up through the roof. Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird are both quite sparing in their use of your PC’s memory, much lighter than accessing the concerned sites in IE or Firefox. Zimbra uses Mozilla Prism as its engine and it’s a tad heavy though still lighter than using a browser. I expect the product to improve when it comes out of beta. If you are a road warrior needing offline access to his mail, just tired of waiting for your mail to load on an underpowered machine, or stuck with an unreliable Net connection, try the relevant option from the three clients mentioned here and you’ll be a happy camper.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com