Whilst web-based email services like hotmail and googlemail are great for personal use, they only enable you to access one email account at a time.
If you want to download all your emails from various accounts into one place (like many small businesses do) , you need software installed on your computer.
You could use Microsoft Outlook Express or Windows Mail, both of which are free, but they are fairly limited in what they can do.
Of course you could always shell out for Microsoft Outlook which is part of Microsoft Office but there is another way.
There are various email software programmes that you can download and use free of charge.
Many of them are listed in an article called Email Programs – Email Client Software by Web Developer Notes.
My favourite is Thunderbird by Mozilla (the people who produce the Firefox web browser).
Thunderbird is great because it has a full range of features and add-ins so you can configure it to work in a way that suits you.
It also has a really clever feature that will detect the email settings for your mail server automatically which takes away all the hassle with configuring things like server ports, SSL settings, and mail server names – it just gets on with it and does all that techie stuff for you.
Just like Firefox, Thunderbird is fully licensed and 100% free to use.
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