What is an Email Client?
Email client like Postbox do not offer any emailing services. For example: servers. They simply offer an interface full of different functionalities that can change your entire ways of dealing with the emails.
Gmail (or any other email providers like Outlook.com or your corporate mails) on the other hand is a complete email service. They are offering servers to store your data and a lots of other things. It also has a web based interface that you use using web-browsers (like Chrome).
An email client allows you to connect to the servers of your email account, download your messages, and displays them to you through its interface.
So, why should you care? If there are web-based interfaces (also called webmail), then why should you check out other third-party email clients.
Why Should You Care About Email Client?
There are plenty of reasons for that. In fact, if you are a heavy user of emails, you might not be able to do a lot using a web-based client. But with something like Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or Postbox, you can dramatically improve your productivity while dealing with emails.
In modern world, it has become almost impossible to even work with emails if you don’t have a commercial desktop email client. For professionals working with corporate servers, it is even more important to keep up with a huge influx of emails they receive daily. And an email client is just simply unavoidable.
To be precise, most web-applications are technically clients. Even Gmail (the most popular webmail) is also a client that connects to the Google’s servers to get your mail. But, here, we are talking about desktop clients. These are built not just to access mails but to do everything you want with them with higher efficiency and productivity.
For example, if your web server is full and out of space, you can use a desktop email client to export that data into files and delete them from servers. Gmail also now offers you to download your data to an MBOX file, but many other web-based clients don’t.
There are many third-party add-ons with most of the email clients. They can extend the functionality of a client even further.
The Best Email Clients
One of the best email clients are like Outlook (for Mac and Windows), Mail (for Mac), Thunderbird (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) and Postbox (for Mac & Windows). There are many others that can offer you features for your specific needs.
The only drawback of such clients appears to be that they need to install on your system. You need to install them on your computer, or wherever you wish to use them. With web-based clients, you can access your emails using a browser from any where.
Many email clients are also called information managers. Because they allow you to do other things as well than just dealing with emails. Outlook has a fully fleshed features to store contacts and calendar entries. You can create reminders, manage a schedule, take notes, make lists, use it as an RSS reader,and many more other activities.
Now there are some newer technologies and software programs. We have far better emailing protocols to connect to servers, such as IMAP (instead of older POP protocol). These are newer standards and systems have taken desktop clients to new heights. Without it seems almost unimagined to deal with the flood of emails a regular email user gets these days.