Email or Webmail Which one would you Prefer?

**Kushan** · 13-02-2009

hi guys........
i have a small problem to ask........

can anyone provide me some information regarding E-mail, Webmail ?
also please provide me that which one of these do you prefer regularly and why?

your views are precious and i require them as a solution for my problem..........

please provide some views ..............

**Jackson2** · 13-02-2009

About Webmail:

Webmail or Web based email is an email service intended to be primarily accessed with the help of a web browser, as restricted through an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla's Thunderbird, or Apple Mail services. Most popular webmail providers include Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and AOL.

The biggest advantage of web based email over application based email is that a user has the ability to access their inbox from any Internet connected computer around the world. But the need for Internet access is also a disadvantage, in that one as one cannot access their old messages when they are not connected to the Internet.

According to prior acquisition by Microsoft, Hotmail introduced its service, which became one of the first popular web based email providers. With Hotmail initial success, Google introduced Gmail which sparked a period of rapid development in web mail, due to Gmail, new features such as JavaScript menus, text-based advertisements, and bigger storage were made possible.

**Techno01** · 13-02-2009

Email and it's Evolution:

Electronic mail often spelled as e-mail, email, or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text based human communications with digital communications systems. A variety of electronic mail system designs evolved that were often incompatible or not supportive.

With the extreme growth of the Internet, the standardization efforts of Internet architects succeeded in providing a single standard based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 RFC 821.

Modern email systems are based on a store and forward model in which email computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only connect to the email infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message transmission or retrieval to or from their designated server. Rarely is email transmitted directly from one user's device to another one.

Email consisted only of text messages composed in the ASCII character set, virtually any media format can be sent today, including attachments of audio and video clips.

**Trio** · 13-02-2009

My view on WEBMAIL

The Webmail extension integrates web site based email accounts in to Mozilla Thunderbird, this allows Thunderbird to download and to send emails using the web site.
Currently Yahoo, Hotmail, MailDotCom, Gmail, Libero, Lycos and AOL domains are supported.
There are also software packages that allow an organization such as company to offer e-mail through the web for their associates. Some solutions are open source software like SquirrelMail, BlueMamba, RoundCube and IlohaMail, while others are closed source like the Outlook Web Access module for Microsoft Exchange, Alt-N Technologies' WorldClient module for MDaemon, and Atmail.
There are programs that can simulate a web browser to access webmail as if it were stored in a POP3 or IMAP account. They are susceptible, though, to changes in the user interface of the web service since there is no standard interface.
Some providers, such as Mail2web offer web access to other's e-mail servers. This allows web access to mailboxes where the mail server does not offer a web interface, or where an alternative interface is desired.
There are important differences in rendering capabilities for many popular webmail services such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Windows Live Hotmail. Due to the various treatment of HTML tags, such as <style> and <head>, as well as CSS rendering inconsistencies, e-mail marketing companies rely on older web development techniques to send cross-platform mail. This usually means a heavy reliance on tables and inline style sheets.

**deveritt** · 13-02-2009

Basic Functioning of Email services:

Format the message in email format and use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send the message to the local mail transfer agent (MTA), in this case smtp.a.org, run by an organistaion Internet Service Provider (ISP).

The MTA looks at the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol. An Internet e-mail address is a string of the form localpart@exampledomain.com, which is known as a Fully Qualified Domain Address (FQDA).

The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, often the user name of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is a domain name. The MTA looks up this domain name in the Domain Name System to find the mail exchange servers accepting messages for that domain.

The DNS server for the domain, responds with an MX record listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, a server run by ISP.

smtp sends the message to other organisation using SMTP, which delivers it to the mailbox of the user.

press the get mail button in MUA, which picks up the message using the Post Office Protocol (POP3).

That sequence of events applies to the majority of e-mail users. However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to the e-mail system:

One may use a client connected to a corporate email system, such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. These systems often have their own internal email format and their clients typically communicate with the email server using a vendor-specific, proprietary protocol.

The server sends or receives e-mail via the Internet through the product's Internet mail gateway which also does any necessary reformatting. If a person work for the same company, the entire transaction may happen completely within a single corporate email system.

One may not have a MUA on his computer but instead may connect to a webmail service.

The computer may run its own MTA, so avoiding the transfer.
A person may pick up his e-mail in many ways, for example using the Internet Message Access Protocol, by logging and reading it directly, or by using a webmail service.

Domains usually have several mail exchange servers so that they can continue to accept mail when the main mail exchange server is not available.
E-mail messages are not secure if e-mail encryption is not used correctly.

It uses to be the case that many MTAs would accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was very important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable.

If an MTA couldn't reach the destination, it could at least deliver it to a relay that was closer to the destination. The relay would have a better chance of delivering the message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by people sending unsolicited bulk e-mail and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and many MTAs will not accept messages from open mail relays because such messages are very likely to be spam.

**Techguru01** · 13-02-2009

Account Set-Up Steps for Webmail:

Initial step is to check the WebMail extension which is running.
Enter the WebMail options, on the server panel the status of the three servers will be displayed. The status for the enabled server(s) should be as Running.
If the WebMail extension fails to start this could be due to the operating system blocking ports below 1024, try setting the port to a value which should higher than 1024 and restart Thunderbird.
Check whether you have installed the necessary domain handlers. Go to WebMail options, on the domains panel is a list of supported domains.

POP Account Creation:

From the main menu select File->New->Account.
In the Account wizard select Email Account
On the Identity page set your name and email address.
Enter the following server information.
Server Type : POP
Incoming Server : localhost
The user name should be included in the domain.
Follow the new account wizard.
If you changed the port number during the WebMail setup stage you must change the port number for this account in Account Settings (tools menu).

SMTP Account Creation:

Open Account settings, select the Outgoing server option from the tree and press the Add Account button.

Use the following server details: