//Tired Of Webmail? There are Alternatives//
By Alex Goodstein
It seems to be a theme to love to hate Penn State’s Webmail service. Webmail is Penn State’s online e-mail access that students, and members of the faculty and staff have become accustomed to using at one point or another. The thing is that many students do not realize two very important facts about receiving e-mail through their Penn State accounts. The first is that Webmail was never meant to be the primary way for people to access their e-mail. The second fact happens to be that there are several different ways to avoid using Webmail to access your Penn State e-mail. Hopefully this will help you make a decision to have an easier and more enjoyable e-mail experience.
Since people are so familiar with using Yahoo Mail and Hotmail these days, they expected to be able to use Webmail in the same manner. However, when Webmail was first formed, its primary use was supposed to be only for temporary access when you were on vacation or away from your desk and could not access the e-mail client on your computer. So, the interface was not very user intuitive, but good enough to just get the job done. The Information Technology Services (ITS) servers hosting Webmail and the Penn State e-mail slowed down and even in some cases crashed due to the higher number of people who began using Webmail to check their e-mail on a regular basis. ITS has tried to resolve the problems, but Webmail is still far from a perfect Web interface for e-mail.
If you insist on still using Webmail, ITS is trying to make it a more pleasurable experience. They have added additional servers to handle the heavier traffic. They also redesigned Webmail to make it more user-intuitive, calling it Webmail2. Webmail now has an interface similar to the new Yahoo Mail beta, using tabs for each section opened during the login session. This allows the user to keep open the inbox, contacts, and messages all in the same browser window without having to reload repeatedly. This does solve some of the problems with the load times on the Web browser and better the visual appeal of Webmail. The ability to have extensive HTML editing when composing an e-mail is also a plus. However, only being able to check your e-mail with an acceptable Web browser and having to wait two minutes between being able to refresh the status of the inbox are still setbacks of Webmail.
ITS and Rescom both suggest that, instead of using Webmail, you use an e-mail client on you computer to download your messages. Rescom even gives examples and steps explaining how to set up the clients on your computer, even if they are a little hard to understand. This allows for advanced features such as advanced HTML editing of your messages, better organization of messages, a more stable interface and additional add-on features like calendar and appointment programs. Many e-mail clients also have built-in spam filters, which is a very useful feature with the abundant amount of spam we receive every day on our Penn State accounts. The most common e-mail clients are Microsoft Outlook Express, which is free for use, and Microsoft Outlook, which has calendar, appointments, tasks, and detailed contacts capabilities. Another great e-mail client is Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and will soon be almost as powerful as Outlook once Mozilla’s Sunbird calendar client is integrated into Thunderbird. If you are a Mac user, I would suggest using OS X’s built-in mail app. It works very well to notify users of new messages and organize messages. Downloading messages to your computer also allows for syncing messages to other devices such as a PDA or a cell phone for the ability to check messages on the go. The downside to e-mail clients is the need to backup messages if you plan on saving them for an extended period of time. Webmail will store messages permanently for you if you want to save them. On a client, if you crash your computer or uninstall the client to use another one, all your messages disappear forever unless they are backed up. Using a client also does not solve the 2 minute refresh period for checking for new messages.
My favorite alternative to using Webmail is to use another online Web service entirely. Gmail has the option receive and send messages from other e-mail accounts as well as a Gmail account. Gmail is the free e-mail service, technically still in its beta form but fully functional, provided by Google. For the last 18 months, new users needed to be invited to join Gmail, but recently Gmail became a public beta that anyone could join. Gmail is very easy to use, keeping the main interface options to a minimum. The composing messages interface also is simple to use showing only the basic options on the top, but allowing for advanced options such as HTML editing if the user wants to use them. Gmail also includes a very powerful spam filter, which I find probably filters out 99 percent of my spam if I actually had to figure it out statistically. When using Gmail, you also can send out messages using your Penn State e-mail address without any problems. Along with Gmail, you can use any of the Google features such as Google Calendar to keep track of appointments, Google Talk, which is an instant message program and many more, all of which link into your Gmail account. Gmail has all the features of a majority of top e-mail clients for free in a Web interface accessible from anywhere.
So now that I have said so much about how I like Gmail, how do you use it to receive your Penn State e-mail? Once you have a Gmail account, you can receive mail from up to five other e-mail addresses in your Gmail account. In your Gmail account settings, you add the new e-mail address to send and receive e-mails. After that, you need to go to work.psu.edu to change your e-mail Web server that sends and receives your e-mail. This completely bypasses the Webmail2 interface and also allows for instantaneous updating of your inbox. There is then no more two-minute wait for your inbox to check for new messages. The downside to Gmail is very hard to sync with a PDA. They are making great strides by creating clients for checking Gmail messages on Blackberry, and cell phones, but still needs work to with Microsoft and Palm PDAs.
So if you continue to use Webmail2 after reading this because you like it, fine, I see how it is. But in all seriousness, Webmail has made some great advances in Webmail2. However, if Webmail2 is not cutting it, you may want to try out one of the other ideas above like a client or Gmail and experience you e-mail in a new light.
Important Websites:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/