COMMENTS ON EMAIL PROGRAMS
Carlos Ovalle

Your choice of what kind of email program to use depends on your needs and what you're doing. I use email constantly, and speed, space, and configurability are important to me. So I use Pine more often than any other email client. Hmm. Well, let me make this exceedingly complicated by trying to explain the different kinds of programs involved.

First, there are computer accounts. These accounts reside on a server and often include the email service. Sometimes we have computer accounts that only offer the email service, such as Hotmail. Second, we have email clients, which are programs that allow us to read, delete, send, or otherwise manipulate our email. Email resides on the server, and we use the clients to interact with the email.

AOL Email, Hotmail, and UT's Webmail are webmail clients. You use your Internet browser to check these messages, which live on a server somewhere else. AOL is a general Internet account that includes email service. Hotmail is solely an email account with a graphical front end. UT's Webmail is a graphical front end to other accounts.

Pine is an email client for Unix type systems, and can be checked anywhere using a telnet-type program, such as Secure Shell or Telnet.

Eudora, Outlook Express, PMMail, and other such programs are email clients for Macs and PCs. You use the programs to get mail from your other accounts.

Webmail and Eudora-Outlook-PMMail are all graphics-based, while Pine is text-based. Pine usually runs directly on the server.

Any of these email clients can be configured to pull email from other servers. So you can use Hotmail, AOL, Pine, Webmail, etc., to check other accounts. Also, you can set up some of your addresses so that email is forwarded to other accounts. For example, you could have all email sent to your mail.utexas.edu account forwarded to your Hotmail account.

The method of setting an email account so that email sent to it will be automatically forwarded to another email depends on the particular account. For example, for mail.utexas.edu, you can telnet to mail.utexas.edu, and there you will be prompted for your name, birthdate, social security, etc. One of the options they give you there is providing a forwarding address. For iSchool email accounts, you need to create a file named .forward in your iSchool account with the forwarding email address. Instructions on how to do this are at How do I forward my email from my iSchool account to another account?

So, to conclude, each of the various ways of using email has its advantages and disadvantages, but you can use what you're comfortable with.