Jan 01 2009

Email in the Cloud

This is the third post in my series on Cloud Computing. Click here for the introduction and index.

Email is the obvious place to start with cloud apps because its both one of the oldest cloud based applications, and because its one of the most common. Almost every email provider has a web based email program, so its pretty easy to get your mail on the web. the problem with most of those web based applications is that they only allow you to read one email account at at time. Since I have personal email address, a business email address, a blog email address, and an email address that only my in-laws use, I don’t want to be going 4 different places each time I check my email.  PC based email programs like Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird let you pull and send from different accounts in the same program, I want to be able to do this on the web too.

I checked the four big webmail providers, AOLmail, HotMail, Yahoo Mail and Google Mail. I chose these four out of convenience, and because given their size, its unlikely that they are going to go out of business anytime soon. Since I know that Google  supports multiple email accounts, I was surprised that Hotmail and AOLmail don’t. Yahoo  also supports multiple accounts. Both Google and Yahoo support pulling email from a  POP email account, which is the most popular method of transferring email to clients.
To setup Google mail go to Settings>>Account, then add your account the the ”Send Mail As” section [Detailed Directions from Google] and then add the download information in the ”Get mail from other accounts” section [Detailed Directions from Google]. 

To setup yahoo mail go to Options>Mail Options>>Accounts and select ”Add or Edit Email Accounts” and add a new account. [Detailed Directions from Yahoo].
Next time, we are going to discuss office applications.
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Filed in Cloud Computing, Email, Internet, Web, What I Use | Jeff Spiller

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