Understanding Email Accounts and Email Clients
The Email Account
As described in “Understanding the Email Process“, an email account for the purposes of these series of articles is defined as the server location where your email address resides and email gets delivered or in short, the term “email account” is used synonmously with the term “email address”. However, there is one topic which needs some additional clarification which is “what is contained in your email account”. At the most basic level, an email account is intended to deal with the sending and receiving of email. However, an important part of that process involves contacts (also commonly referred to generically as an <AddressBook>) and for most people also includes calendar and task entries. All these items sum up to the PIM (Personal Information Management) information otherwise refered to here as Email Account Content
Email Account Content
The content maintained at the server level for a given email account is generally comprised of the following items
- Contacts
- Contact Groups / Distribution Lists
- Calendar
- Tasks
Unlike <Email> which is “for the most part” governed by a series of RFC (one definition for RFC: https://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RFC.html) documents submitted to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), what is included for contact items is determined by the ESP in terms of what pieces of information is included for a specific item at the server level. There is no universal standard for contacts. Regardless of what can be physically saved for a contact at the server level, it’s the email client that will dictate what pieces of information are available. This is equally true of task items.
There are also various standards for Calendar items making it easier to manage a calendar based on differing systems (predominently iCalendar and CalDav). However, not all systems and email clients support all calendar types. For those who want a more in-depth technical overview of calendar standards, doing a search on the term “calendar sharing standards” will return numerous results
Accessing Email account information
Once you have your email account, you know need to be able to retrieve the information and do something with it. There are two categories of email clients, each with different capabilities and functionality – Browser based Webmail and Desktop/Mobile based email clients.
WebMail – browser based access to your email account
The benefit of using a browser based email client is that you can access your email account from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection (the Gmail’s offline option not part of this discussion). When using Webmail, you are interacting with the information directly stored on the server with no need to download anything to the device (computer/tablet/phone etc) you are using to connect. You also don’t have to worry about whether it’s a POP, Imap, Exchange ActiveSync account etc. As long as you know your user ID and password, you’ll be able to access the data contained in the email account regardless of how the email account may be configured in any desktop/mobile client.
Whenever an issue arises about what may or may not be getting downloaded, synchronized etc between your server email account and desktop client, the first step is to ensure that the information actually exists at the server level which can be done be accessing the account data via your WebMail client.
The user interface along with what can and cannot be done is completely under the control of the email service provider and the email server that is in use. There are a number of different back end servers used by providers and each of those can be different (or the same) as the case may be – just depends on what is in use.
Desktop/Mobile Email clients
There are countless different desktop/mobile email clients, free and paid. The most popular paid email client being Outlook with Thunderbird following as the most popular free email client.Just because you are using a mobile device to access an Outlook.com account for example, doesn’t mean that you are using the Outlook desktop client. Mobile email clients are exactly that, email clients provided by vendor with a given device.
The one major thing that all email desktop/mobile clients have in common is that each separate email address/account needs to be “configured” separately identifying the “type” of email account you want to set up (i.e. POP, Imap, EAS – or in other words – the protocol that is to used to retrieve information etc), applicable settings such as server names and port numbers along with the usual user id and password information.
There are two separate and distinct components that have to be configured for a POP or Imap account when configured manually, the server information used to read your email and the one used to send your messages. A more detailed description for this can be found in the “Understanding Email Protocols“ article.
Category: Understanding Outlook
