Email Protocols and Clients

There are several ways that you can manage your email and there are many popular email clients that you can choose from. Choosing the right way to deal with your email actually depends on how many emails you receive everyday and how you want to access your email. The first question you will face is: Where do you want to store your email?

You have two choices: on server or on your local hard drive, usually your PC's local hard drive. If you have a Unix workstation, you do not have to worry about this. However, if you have a windows machine, downloading emails to your local mailbox through POP3 protocol is tempting. It is easier and faster and you can read your emails offline (without having to connect to the server.) The major problem of this is that you can only access your email through your PC.

Where you store your email determines how you can access your email. You have several options:

• downloading mail to your PC through POP3 protocol. All windows mail clients can do this.
• log on to stat servers and use a text based (pine, elm or mutt) or X-based (dtmail, Netscape) mail client to manage your emails. These mail client will manipulate your mailbox directly or use `move mail' to move your emails to their own mailboxes.
• use IMAP protocol to access your emails from a remote machine. All major windows and Unix mail clients support this method. If you have many big mailboxes, IMAP connection can be very slow.

Even if you manage your emails mostly under Unix, you might still need to use windows mail clients to open some windows-specific attachments. Many of the grad students and faculty in stat department use a combination of the latter two methods mentioned above.

Table 4.2 lists mail servers that you can use:

Table 4.2: Mail Servers

account

pop3 server

imap server

smtp server stat