The Broadband Genie guide to email

It may now be slightly less relevant for day to day communication thanks to Facebook, Twitter, text messages and IM, but email is still an essential requirement for everyone. Not only for contacting friends and family, you'll need an email address to register for web sites, shop, play games and all that other good stuff.

Even if you have email already maybe you've just bought a mobile broadband dongle or are swapping ISPs, and thinking about making some changes to how it's accessed and managed.

ISP email or an independent provider?

Lots of us have email service provided by our broadband company. When registering you would have been given, or asked to choose, an email address and been provided with access details. The problem with using email from an ISP is changing providers almost certainly results in losing the email address.

Customers of long-running ISPs such as BT Internet, Demon and Pipex may have had the same email for years, and even defunct providers are still in existence as domain names - Virgin provides a login for old NTLWorld users. A decade-old email address will have been used to register for countless web sites and other services such as online utility bill payment, so changing all of those could be an epic task.

The alternative to this is to use an independent email service, then your ISP doesn't matter since the email is separate and always available.

This can be one of the many freebie email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail. For something that's got a few more freatures at a cost, there's the excellent Fastmail.

Outlook vs webmail

There are two choices for accessing email - downloading it to your computer (or indeed any other device) with an email client and using a webmail interface.

Email clients

Using software such as Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Apple Mail or Thunderbird, email is downloaded from the server and stored on your computer.

• Wide choice of email software and the extensive settings grant a large degree of control over the look and feel of the interface and loads of options for sending and receiving.

• Spam filtering can be done using an email client's filter and/or anti-spam tools, so with a bit of effort you can very effectively block junk and easily tweak the settings to suit.

• Easy to backup email as it's stored on the computer and can be quickly saved to an external hard drive or cloud storage server.

• Stored email is available even when there's no internet access.

• Cheap multi-GB or terabyte hard drives offer practically unlimited storage space.

• Multiple email accounts can be handled using a single email client (and filtered into different folders for organisation).

Disadvantages:

• If your hard drive keels over, and there are no backups, the email is gone forever.

• If the email client has not been configured to keep messages stored on the server after they're downloaded (and this is not usually enabled by default) email which has been read will not be accessible from any other system.

• Downloading a large number of emails, or emails with very big attachments, can use a lot of bandwidth, which is a problem for mobile broadband and its stingy data limits.

• Spam filters and anti-virus must be correctly setup to prevent malicious emails unleashing their virulent payload on your computer.

• Reinstalling an operating system or buying a new PC will mean migrating stored email and settings, and changing email clients could involve converting the email to a different format.

Webmail

The email account is accessed with a web browser and all emails and attachments are stored on the provider's servers. As offered by Hotmail, Gmail and the rest.

Advantages of webmail:

• Always available from any web browser in the world.

• Email is displayed on a web page and not downloaded so uses less bandwidth.

• The servers handle spam and virus blocking so you don't need to set it up yourself, but filtering options will often still be available for advanced users.

• No specialist software required and does not need a particular operating system.

• Instantly available on a new PC or following a hard drive wipe-and-reinstall.

• Very easy to setup and use.

• Webmail is not immune to disasters, we trust online services so are less likely to have backups.

• Some webmail will wipe stored email and deactivate the account if not accessed regularly.

• Storage space is limited (though the limit may be very high)

• Email will be inaccessible when there's no internet connection.

• Moving your emails to a new service can be a convoluted process.

Webmail with an email client  

Webmail is going to be the best choice for most as it requires no technical knowledge and minimal setup, it just works and is compatible with anything capable of running a web browser. But using webmail does not mean you can't also get an email client to download messages.

In order to use email software you need four things: POP3 or IMAP server, SMTP server, username and password.

The POP3 or IMAP server is used to retrieve incoming messages, while SMTP is for sending. The username and password should be the same as the webmail login. Armed with these settings, you can pull down your webmail messages to a PC. This is useful for getting an offline backup and saving your messages when moving to a different email provider.

To ensure messages remain available via webmail after downloading, set the mail client to leave email on the server.

If you're having problems setting up your mail software or finding the server details for your mail provider, post in the comments or our community forum.

Here's the necessary info for the biggest webmail providers:

Gmail

• POP3: pop.gmail.com (SSL port 995)
• SMTP: smtp.gmail.com (SSL port 465, TLS/STARTTLS port 587)
• Login name: full email address

Needs to be enabled via Gmail's settings first, Google has a guide.

Yahoo

• POP3: plus.pop.mail.yahoo.com (SSL port 995)
• SMTP: plus.smtp.mail.yahoo.com (SSL port 465)
• Login name: your Yahoo email address without @yahoo.com

(note this requires an upgrade to Yahoo Mail Plus, or use the free YPOPs software)

Hotmail/Windows Live Mail

• POP3: pop3.live.com (SSL port 995)
• SMTP: smtp.live.com (SSL port 25)
• Login name: Hotmail/Windows Live email address

Email and mobile broadband

Mobile broadband does not usually include an email address as part of the package so if you don't have one already you'll need to sign up. There's no need to pay for this, just register for one of the big three email providers listed above (or whichever service you'd prefer instead).

A webmail account separate from any ISP is the best choice for mobile broadband. It uses less bandwidth and the ability to access all your messages from multiple systems is useful if you have both a desktop and laptop. The hassle-free setup and management is also a plus.

Most importantly, because it isn't linked to an internet provider it won't matter if you change networks at the end of the contract.

If you've got email through your home broadband provider this will still be accessible via mobile broadband. It doesn't matter what connection you're using to login, just that you've got the right username and password. 

For those of you wanting to use an email client and download emails to the PC, I'd recommend setting your mail application to download mail headers only, either for all messages or those over a certain size. That way you can check whether the email is important before downloading so you don't waste mobile broadband data on useless emails.