Try an alternative email client with the new eM Client 1.1
If you upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 you may have found that Microsoft Outlook different little from the previous version. Indeed, there are some users who prefer the previous Office 2003, with it's more simplistic user-interface, rather than the ribbon you find in the latest suite. However, there aren't too many alternatives to Outlook that offer the flexibility and collaboration tools. Install Outlook 2007 across a number of workstations and it isn't a cheap solution for enabling your staff to access their email.
eM Client 1.1 is a brand new email client that resembles Outlook 2003, with it's simple user-interface. It will import your Outlook email, offers you access to a calendar and planned new features include the facility to synchronise with your Google Calendar and more.
If you use your email client to write to different users, you might want to customise your messages depending on the recipient. For instance, if you write to the boss, you might want your email to be formalm with a particular signature. Write to your customers and it could be more informal with a basic signature, as you might not want them calling you on your direct line.
With many of us moving over to web mail, this enables us to access our incoming email from just about any location, as long as you have access to a web browser. If you're at work, you can't set up your email client to download your personal email and you won't want to be seen to be checking your Gmail account every 10 minutes to see if you've received mail. The answer is an assistant that will keep checking your account to see if you have a new message and then notify you discreetly.
If you were going to consider an email client, what would be your final choice? There aren't too many email clients available and the market is dominated by the paid-for Microsoft Outlook and the free Mozilla Thunderbird. Recenty Qualcomm stopped developing the Eudora email client and decided to help with the next version of Thunderbird. Indeed, at one stage there were rumours that there wouldn't be a new version of the free email client.
If you work across multiple computers, you probably use a different email client on each to download and process your email. On your work PC you may have Microsoft Outlook installed, your Mac-based laptop may use Mozilla Thunderbird, whilst you may only bother with an online mail service from your home PC. Either way, you'll be using different email clients to access your email. Wouldn't be handy to be able to bring the email under one interface, on one system?
Although it's probably not going to go up on our vnunet.com downloads for a while, Yahoo have released the first preview of their 
The problem with spam is that it's led to server-side spam filtering, which means your ISP decides what email you receive in your email box. This is fine if you want to rid the majority of spam from your inbox, but it can lead to legitimate email from being classed as spam before it reaches your inbox. You can't get around this problem unless you turn off the server-side spam filtering. The best alternative is to install anti-spam technology in your email client and choose the email you regard as spam.
Social networking applications are hugely popular, and when Microsoft announce, unofficially, new features planned for Windows Live Messenger 9, people immediately want the new version, even if it's still in alpha. Worryingly for the publishing industry, a couple of rival downloads sites have even found file-sharing links to this closed beta and have offered it to their web users. Do they have any scruples? Windows Live Messenger 9 is only available as a closed and early beta to selected testers, so isn't available for public consumption.
We get so much spam these days that you often do not have the time to download your email before you start work. If anyone has used Microsoft Outlook, they'll tell you it can be very resource-heavy. Often you have to wait for the process of downloading and sorting your email to finish, before you can do some serious work. Particularly CPU intensive work. For this reason, it's it could be more useful to use a lightweight email notify application to inform you when important email arrives, then you could go online and read with your webmail service.
nothing better than chatting with people, rather than using email or even chatting to other users through something like messenger, or similar online chat apps. Email is so impersonal and it's used, like texting people, to cop-out of having to give someone bad news. Not good. With this in mind, using VoIP tools is a far more personal way to keep in touch with friends, family and even business colleagues. Up until recently, we'd have used Skype, but there are alternatives.
Only a few years ago many Internet users would swear by Eudora, even though it was a paid-for product. You'd often find that people would rate this over and above the free Outlook Express, even though that was a more than capable email client. How times have changed. Even though Outlook Express is no more, Thunderbird is one of the more popular free email clients, which has left the publishers of Eudora with a dilemma - they still have a large userbase, but the long-term future of a commercial Eudora didn't make financial sense.
A frustrating aspect of being a non-Window user is that some of the latest technologies are not always available for the Mac operating system. For instance, take VoIP technology. Skype for Windows users could use video conferencing long before Skype for Mac users. Whereas the Skype for Windows version is at v3.5, the Mac version is still on release v2.6.
We all like to keep in regular touch with our families, friends and, in some cases, work colleagues. The trouble is, phoning long distance can leave a large dent in your bank balance and can leave you in shock when your quarterly phone bill arrives. Sending an e-mail is always an option for staying in touch, but can be arduous, is not that ‘instant’, can be a difficult way of communicating quickly, often leading to the recipient hanging around waiting for a reply.
If you have a static IP address, there's no reason why you couldn't use an old PC as your own server. Ok, your broadband connection might not be fast enough to run a professional web server, but you could use it to setup your own mail server and handle your incoming email. If you lived in shared accommodation, you could then use a domain name and setup local POP3 mailboxes for users who had access to the server. The same applies to a small company or department.
If you're seeking an integrated email, PIM and calendar, you probably would think of Microsoft Outlook. Indeed, it's popular as you can schedule meetings, invite other users, track their interest through email and even use it to manage your contacts. It's a a PIM and email client in one application and works effectively. However, it's also rather expensive and can be very slow in downloading and processing your email. There are free alternatives.
If you've used Microsoft Outlook, you'll know that it starts download email and then writes to the (PST) database file close to downloading your last mail. If anything happens when you're downloading this email, it will download the same email again when you restart your computer. Another duplicate scenario is where someone sends you the same email to multiple email addresses, or simply resends it more than once. Either way, you'll end up with the same email multiple times. Add these together, along with all your spam, and you'll soon find that you have hundreds or thousands of emails to work through.
There are so many IM clients available, enabling us to chat to other Internet users. Skype is no exception, although it's primarily based around chatting on a Skype phone/headset, across your net connection. It's still one of the most popular ways of keeping in touch with your net-based friends, although one feature that's been lacking is inter-operability with other IM clients. For instance, if a friend insists on using Yahoo Messenger or Gizmo Project, you can't chat with them using Skype.
With the facility to tag a phone number to your Skype account, there's no reason why you couldn't use the system instead of your regular phone. Anyone with a fairly fast broadband connection will have more than enough bandwidth to handle high-quality audio conversations. The snag is, whereas your regular phone line can be set up to answer and record messages if you're away from your desk or on the phone, your Skype phone might not be set up to accept messages.
Using the telephone is easy, as it's based around and agreed standard. Pick up the phone, call someone down the road or in South America. Either way, as long as they have a phone, you'll be able to chat with them. Chatting across the Internet should be just as easy, but it isn't. Why not? As Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Yahoo and others have developed their own standards which are not always compatible with other IM clients. If you use MSN Messenger, you can't chat with a Skype user, for example.
Were you around in the late 90s when only a handful of people used the Internet? In those days, Microsoft didn't dominate the web browser market, people primarily logged on to FTP sites to download the latest freeware and shareware and chatting was done through IRC or ICQ (indeed, I don't know IRC isn't used more often as it's such a good tool for multi-user discussion). ICQ was almost the forerunner to products such as 
It's seems a long time to develop a new email client, but 
Skype's been around for a long while now and is arguably the premier VOIP application for chatting to friends and family, across the Internet. It's established technology and are few additional consumer-based features that could be included to enhance the software. With 
If you're an advice-based business, perhaps offering consultancy, a therapy service or similar, there are thousands of Internet users who may require your services. 
Skype isn't the only tool that will enable you to chat to other users, using your computer as a phone, over the Internet. The Gizmo Project is a rival product that will enable you to chat traditionally (traditionally being through the keyboard, directly to another Gizmo user) or use broadband to chat over the Internet, cheaply.
Microsoft Outlook is a powerful tool, combining your email, a calendar, your 'to do' list and the ability to contact other users and share their information through an Exchange server. However, as we mostly use Outlook for our email, we rarely look at the calendar and rely on reminders to keep us informed of forthcoming meetings or tasks.
If you use Microsoft Outlook on your work computer and your laptop, when you're out the office on business, you have one or two options: you could set up your laptop-based Outlook to leave the email messages on your POP3 server then download them when you get back to your office. However, if you're out of the office for a long time, this might not prove efficient. The alternative is to use a synchronisation tool to sync your email across the two computers.
When we're used to using a particular email client, we find it hard to move across to another. If you're like the majority, you'll probably have more than one POP3 account and have forgotten your password or the relevant account info. Worse, the new email client may not properly import your old email, so you can't move across your old data.
Microsoft Outlook is the default email client for many corporate users. With good reason too. It's well structured, highly-configurable, enables you to manage your diary and meeting schedule and links to an Exchange server so you can share information between users. However, it's also very slow. Due to the sheer amount of spam we receive, Outlook can take a while to start, downloading email can take up to half an hour and it is very processor intensive. Searching can be slow, too. Much of this will change with Office 2007, but that's still forthcoming for the average end-user.
After a relatively short testing period, the official version of 
Business users often have a desktop computer and then use a laptop on the road or for accessing email at home. However, this often means you have two copies of Outlook, with two different databases. One option would be to keep the emails on the remote server, but with all the junk and spam email, your server might soon be full of email waiting to be deleted.
One of the most frustrating part of being a Mac user is that the Mac versions of widely distributed Windows software, aren't always kept as up-to-date. Skype is a classic example. When Skype for Windows was at 2.0, the Mac version was still at v1.x. This means some of the key features, such as video conference calling, wouldn't work on the Mac version of Skype.
More of us are turning to online 'friends' rather than chatting with our neighbours. When we want advice, we turn to online forums for other users to make our decisions for us. With this in mind, 
The Skype developers are some of the most productive commercial developers in the market, releasing new revisions of the software every few weeks. We've also gone from v2, through 2.5 to very latest release, a beta of 
Have the Mozilla Corporation forgotten about Thunderbird 2.0 or have they been so busy developing Firefox 2.0 that their resources have been stretched too far? A beta version of Thunderbird 2.0 was due in October and we're all looking forward to the new release.
Google has accidentally leaked the latest version of its increasingly
popular 
With rumours rife that popular networking site 
