Setting up your email application - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Instructor] There are two basic ways to access your email, either through your email provider's website, for example, you could go to gmail.com in your web browser to access your Gmail email. Or you can use one of several available email applications to download, read, write, and manage your email. MacOS has a built-in application called simply Mail that you can use, or alternately, you can also use third-party email applications like Mozilla Thunderbird, or any other third-party programs like Airmail or Spark. These email applications are referred to as email clients. And again, you can use these clients or access your email through a web browser, or both. If you choose to go the web-based email route, there's very little you need to set up. Just go to your email service's website and log in with your username and password. And this doesn't just apply to free email services like Gmail or Yahoo mail, many businesses and schools offer their employees and students web access to their email. The advantage is that it's very easy to get your email from any computer with an internet connection. The downside is that you have to be connected to the internet to read and compose your emails. So many people prefer to use email clients because it offers the ability to view your old emails and compose new messages without having to be online. So if you are on a plane with no internet access, for example, you could still review the emails you've previously received and write new emails to be sent once you land and get back online. If you only used web-based mail, you wouldn't have access to any of your received emails. Now, you could still compose new emails, but you'd have to do so in a word processor or other text editor and then copy and paste that email into your web mail once you got back online. So if email is a big part of your day to day activities, it makes sense to set up an email client. Now again, there are several choices of clients out there and these are just four examples that we're looking at here. But regardless of which email client you end up using, you'll still need to understand and use specific information in order to set up your email through your client of choice. Let's take a look at the basics. The first thing to know is that there are two main types of email systems, POP and IMAP. In recent years, POP has sort of lost favorability in favor of IMAP and we'll see why in a moment. But basically, POP works like this. When someone sends you a message, that message is stored on your email service's server. And it stays there until your email client notices the new message and downloads it off the server. Once the message has been downloaded from the server, it's usually deleted anywhere from immediately to within one or two weeks. At that point, the only copy of that email is found on your computer. The problem with POP email is that if you use more than one computer or device to check your email you may end up with some messages on one computer and other messages on another computer. And if you're like most people these days, you probably have more than one device that you receive email on, like your phone. For this reason, most email service providers offer and recommend using IMAP email service. Unlike POP email, IMAP email is all kept and managed online. So if for example, you read a new incoming message on your computer, your phone will still download a copy of that message as well. With IMAP email, both received and sent messages will remain synced across all of your devices and you'll have access to all of your messages, regardless of which device you're using. So the first step of setting up an email client is to decide if you want POP or IMAP, and of course, you should choose IMAP. Next, you'll need your username and password. Your email service, your work, or your school will provide these to you. In many cases you'll be able to create your own username and password. You'll also need to know your incoming and outgoing mail servers. This is the unique address that lets your email client know where to find your email server so it can download and send messages. Incoming servers often take the form of addresses like imap.gmail.com or imap.mail.yahoo.com. While outgoing mail servers usually begin with the prefix of smtp, as in smtp.gmail.com. SMTP stands for simple mail transfer protocol, not that you need to know that, but it's the most common outgoing server address. Now, where you enter this information is going to vary from email client to email client. Most modern email clients have a setup assistant that walks you through setting up your email with a series of questions. If you have email service through a fairly common provider, you may find that your email client is able to fill out all the server information for you and that you'll only need to provide your username and password. If you have a less common provider, you may have to enter that information manually. Just know that all the necessary information to set up your email will be provided to you by your email service. So that's the basics of what you need to know to set up an email client. Again, if you're using web-based email, you don't need to know anything about incoming or outgoing servers. You just log in with your username and password on the email provider's website. But if you spend a lot of time with email, you should definitely start using an email client.