E-mail Clients

Nowadays it is difficult to find a person who has never send a single message via Internet, whether they were using e-mail, instant messengers, IRC, web chats, blogs or social networking web sites. Benefits of online communication far surpassed regular ‘snail’ mail. Numerous advantages of online tools include simplicity of information and data exchange, high speed e-mail delivery, broadcasting and advertizing world wide, effective collaboration with friends, family members, or co-workers, sharing web content via social networks.

However, informal style of e-mail negatively affects the quality of written language. Also the ease of e-mail distribution may interfere with one’s interests, since messages can be easily forwarded to a wide amount of recipients without notifying an original sender.

Online communication requires unique identifier for each user. For instance, e-mail addresses which, despite their vast variety, share the same basic structure and include user ID, host name and a top-level domain (TLD).
In order to create, receive or send messages, e-mail clients or specialized online e-mail accounts are commonly used. E-mail client is special software to handle your correspondence. Most popular examples of e-mail clients are Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Windows Mail, Microsoft Windows Live Mail, Opera Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird. To interact with servers, e-mail clients utilize several protocols such as Post Office Protocol (POP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Usually most of the e-mail clients have similar structure of the message window and include following elements:
• The To line
• The Cc line
• The Bcc line
• The Subject line
• The Attach line
• The message body
• Signature file
E-mail clients are advantageous as they allow to organize correspondence in convenient for users order by utilizing folders tree and sometimes include time planning features as, for example, in Microsoft Outlook.


Sources: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBzLPmx3xTU
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