I'm sorry that this will be such a dumb question but I really don't understand anything about how programs like MS Outlook, Juno, Thunderbird, etc. work. Never used 'em except when my dad had Juno for a bit like 7 years ago when I knew nothing about computers. I want to give thunderbird a try but I'm sooo confused! Help would be really appreciated. How exactly do these things work different from online clients (is "client" the right term?) like hotmail, gmail, etc? I know that hotmail and them store all your emails on their servers. So when u use thunderbird or outlook or something, all your emails get stored on *your* computer, right? And how exactly do u have to configure it with your ISP? I know that when u configure it u have to identify the incoming/outgoing server, but I don't understand what that means very well. Also, my email address will have to have the domain name or whatever it's called of my ISP right? So, if I got cox as ISP, won't my email have to end with "@cox.net"? But other than that, when I configure thunderbird, I can make up any email name I want right?
The point of using something like thunderbird as opposed to using all your email websites separately is that thunderbird can recieve all of your emails in one place and you can manage them more easily. With thunderbird you have all of your emails and contacts' email addresses in one place. Since I dont actually use thunderbird, I dont really know if there's anything major i missed (hope not :-P). If you're still interested in picking up thunderbird, I would suggest downloading it from the official site and setting it up using this walkthrough. Best of luck to you! Let us know how it goes if you decide to give it a shot.
Don't worry, good question. Email clients work by updating their 'memory' of your email account every time they start by communicating with your email provider's server. For example, for my hotmail live account (normal hotmail accounts don't let you use an email client) and my outlook program works like this: 1. You set up your email client with a new account by entering your email address, the address of the email server and your password. 2. Every time I open outlook, if I have an internet connection outlook with synchronize my outlook folders with my hotmail ones. I have set up my hotmail account with a Archive folder, where I put my read emails. In outlook, i can view my email, and outlook already has a record of my Archive folder. I can drag it to Archive once its read and outlook will communicate with the server and tell it to do likewise. I can delete an email in outlook and it will be deleted on the email server aswell. If you don't have an active net connection, new emails and any changes you make won't be applied to the server until next time the client can connect. This goes for other email clients aswell like Thunderbird. Your ISP doesn't have to get involved, your ISP will provide you with an email account which you can configure like any other email account provider, but people rarely use ISP ones. I use hotmail and gmail (gmail supports email clients, though in a slightly different way to hotmail).
Alright, so by "your email address" you mean that's where I enter my hotmail account address or whatever other email account I use, right? So then how do I find out the "address of the email server"? Is it listed in some help section of hotmail or anything?
Regular Hotmail accounts don't work with a client. Neither to regular Yahoo! accounts. The account has to either have POP3 or Imap to work. Yes, under "your e-mail adsress" that is your address. The other info should be on a help page or something. For example, if you want to sync Gmail, here is the info you need: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12103
