Cloud Email is The Future
With every day the world turns and the world evolves and moves forward. With every day, we advance technology, we move from having a phone in every home to everyone having cell phones and switching land lines to VoIP, with mail switching to Email and communication getting faster, more electronic and more important.
Email Changed the World
When the Internet was new and fresh it was used mainly for chat rooms and later evolved the web browser and web pages and eventually electronic versions of Post/Mail came about. We called it Email because we wanted to use it just like mail and these days that is what we see everywhere. People chat by Email now at work more then phone calls, chat programs and meetings. And every office meeting, phone call or chat is followed up by a summary Email that spawns an entirely new Email thread that continues the discussion and summarizes everything that was discussed. At home we use Email to receive invitations to events (Facebook and Evite), we use it to find out who get new jobs (LinkedIn), we use it to receive our bills (Epost). We also use it to send our friends and family funny cat pictures and updates about the kids.
Fast Mobile Email
We don’t even wait anymore to get to work or home to get our Emails. We receive them right on our smartphones. It is common now to see your average office job worker with a Blackberry from work and a smartphone of their own. So it is common to carry at least two Emails with you at all times so you can always be within 15 minutes of your Emails, because they are that important these days.
Cloud Email is the Future
With Emails being as important as they are, not many people are noticing that their current Email providers are not really keeping up with the world. Having lived in Canada for so many years it was common to see two kinds of Email addresses by friends and family would have. The @rogers.com or @sympatico.ca Email accounts are common because they are free. When you buy internet at home, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) normally gives you a few Email accounts for free on their own servers because it doesn’t really cost them anything but if they did not offer this you would not take them. What people don’t notice is these kinds of Email accounts are very old. What I mean is the world and the Internet are changing, and Emails tied to your ISP and using their old Email technology are just not enough anymore. Cloud Email is the Future.
What is Cloud Email and why is it the Future ?
What is Cloud Email and why Cloud Email is the Future? Well Cloud Email is when someone else provides you the service of hosting your Emails for you and allows you to access them from anywhere at anytime without restrictions.
You may ask if and how this is different from the traditional Email services you are used to getting from your ISP. Well Cloud Email also means that an Email Client (i.e. Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla ThunderBird, Apple Mail) is not required in order to access these.
Apple
Even though iPhones, iPad and Mac computers all come with an Email Client the free Cloud Email service provided by Apple (@me.com) does not require you to use an Email Client, though most still do. When you get any Apple device and you start to install apps on it you will find you need an Apple account and Apple is happy to provide you a free @me.com Email address to go along with that but you may not be aware that you can go to the iCloud website (www.icloud.com) and sign in with your credentials and do everything from there. This allows you to have access to your Contact, your Emails and a few other things Apple provides there right on your desktop and without you having to pull out your smartphone or running it inside of a Client application, just a secure web site will do.
Hotmail
Hotmail is one of the oldest Cloud Email providers. What they offer is a free Email address which you can get access to either by correctly setting up an Email Client or by just visiting their web site www.hotmail.com. There are of course limitations like a maximum amount of storage space for your Emails and a maximum size for each sent Email but these are generally higher limits then the Email accounts your ISP provides and you will not loose the account if you change Internet providers or move countries.
Gmail
If you need more space and larger Emails, you can always go with the Google solution to Cloud Email, Gmail. A Gmail account is free and easy to get (once you provide you are a real person). It can be accessed from an Email Client but they actually prefer that you use their web site. It gives you a much larger storage space for your Emails (15GB currently) and allow for Emails and attachments larger then the standard 10 MB limit. In fact the limit is 1 GB per Email (including all Email text and code). When Gmail first came out the majority of people who got one were in fact using it to store and/or transfer larger files because of these increased limits but I find it means I do not have to be so strict on deleting my Emails.
One of my favorite advantages to using Gmail (my personal preference) is that the Spam filter in Gmail is basically the best Email Spam Filter I have ever seen. It gives you control enough to say an Email is or is not Spam and it will learn from what you select but the automatic selections are better then I could have imagined.
One of my other favorite features of Gmail is the fact that I have configured my Gmail account to check my 9 (that’s right 9) other Email accounts every hour for new Emails, pulls them down, filters them for Spam, then marks them as having come from that other Email address but still puts them in my Inbox. I like to call it a Unified Inbox because it means that my 10 Email addresses show up in a single Inbox and that helps me beyond belief. Thing is, on top of checking it also allows me to setup each Email address so I can send out as that Email address too. It basically behaves like an intelligent Email Client so I don’t need any other. Another advantage of this is that on my Android phone, I only need to connect my Gmail account to my Gmail app and all my Emails appear there thanks to all the backend work by Gmail, saving me having to keep 10 Email accounts running and finishing my battery.