Desktop Email Offers Solutions You May Want

Have you ever received an email attachment and had trouble opening it?

Do you often think how handy it would be if email had the same look and feel of other desktop applications?

Would you like Web pages, images, and animations to appear with just a click of the mouse on a Web address in the email you are reading?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you might consider using a desktop email program. For a small investment of your time, you may be able to establish a different working environment that would improve your efficiency now and position you to reap the benefits of future advancements in technology. Desktop email could be just the answer you are looking for.

How Is Most Email Now Handled at the UW?

A common way to access your email folders (and the Internet) at the UW is by connecting to Homer or Dante (where the Pine email program resides and a lot of the work is handled) via Telnet from your PC or Macintosh computer.

If you are among this group, very little of the work that goes into managing and processing your email takes place on your desktop computer. Almost everything happens on Homer or Dante. All that runs on your PC or Macintosh computer is a terminal emulatio n program. Pine running on Homer or Dante takes care of the rest:

• Managing your Inbox and other email folders

• Processing commands you give and text you type

• Formatting the information you see

• Deleting and forwarding your email messages

Because Pine is running on Homer or Dante and not on your desktop computer (see diagram above), it cannot be integrated with the programs you have running on your desktop. Although the character-based terminal emulation programs such as Telnet are extremely reliable and robust, and can run on a wide variety of computers both new and old, they are not able to offer the seamless computing that people increasingly want.

What Can Desktop Email Do?

With desktop email, your PC or Macintosh is home to a desktop email client (such as PC-Pine or Outlook Express) that uses standard Internet protocols to directly access and process your email, and can interact with programs on your computer.

• Automatically starting up the appropriate software on your computer such as Web browsers, spreadsheets, and word processors needed by the document you are trying to read

• Easily accessing files on your computer's disk drives without having to transfer them using FTP

Some people feel these are the biggest advantages of using a desktop email client. If someone sends you an email attachment that is a Microsoft WordŽ document, for example, your desktop email client will launch your Word program to read it.

Which One Is Right for You?

C&C now supports two desktop email clients: PC-Pine and Microsoft Outlook Express, the desktop email client that comes with Internet Explorer. There are advantages to each one, so which should you choose?

If you are comfortable working with Pine and want to continue using your trained finger muscle memory or make use of Pine's many new and advanced features, but are longing for easier viewing and sending of attachments and embedded Web links in email, then you will probably want to try PC-Pine. It works similarly to Pine, but has the added advantages of a desktop email client.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a graphical user interface that feels just like other Microsoft Windows or Macintosh programs and that, like PC-Pine, also has easier attachment viewing, then you will probably want to try Outlook Express.

Although C&C can only support the use of PC-Pine and Outlook Express, there are other desktop email clients that work with the UW's standards-based email servers. These include Netscape Communicator, Eudora, Mulberry, Simeon, and Microsoft Outlook 98.

Individual departments on campus have selected various desktop email clients to support. If you have questions about which client to use, check with your departmental computer support staff.

If you want to try configuring a desktop email client other than PC-Pine or Outlook Express, you could start by looking at www.washington.edu/computing/faqs/html/deskmail on the Web for general instructions on how to make it work with the UW's email servers.

What You Need to Start

	   IMAP incoming email server : jsmith.deskmail.washington.edu
        	           login name : jsmith

	         email address always : jsmith@u.washington.edu

	 outgoing email (SMTP) server : mailhost.u.washington.edu
        	   news (NNTP) server : news.u.washington.edu

To work most effectively with the UW's email servers, your desktop email client should support SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for sending email, and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) for accessing email. "How Does a Desktop Email System Work?" provides additional information.

The easiest way for you to install and configure a desktop email client is with the UW Internet Connectivity Kit (UWICK). The Autumn 1998 UWICK includes the two desktop email clients supported by C&C, with procedures for installing and configuring them to work properly at the UW. If you have a PC running Windows, you can choose either Outlook Express or PC-Pine; if you have a Macintosh, your only choice in the UWICK is Outlook Express.

Using and Reading Your Email Multiple Ways

As long as you use the IMAP protocol to access your email on the UW's email servers, you can use Pine on Homer and Dante, or use your desktop email client, or even switch between multiple clients. With IMAP, your Inbox and folder collections stay in one central place, accessible to any email client, and so your view of messages--whether they are marked new, deleted, or important--is the same. POP (the Post Office Protocol) works differently, and so is not able to provide the same convenient accessibility.

Changing Your Email Client May not Be an Option for You

If you are happy using Pine on Homer or Dante, that is fine; you are all set. C&C will continue to support Pine and expects that a large proportion of the campus community will be reading their email with Pine for years to come, as do millions of people worldwide.

If, however, you want to experiment with a different way of using email, now might be the time to give one of the desktop email clients a try.

For More Information

• Ask your local computing support staff

• Obtain the UW Internet Connectivity Kit (see www.washington.edu/computing/docs/uwick.html for details)

• Read the desktop email section on the Computing and Networking Web site at www.washington.edu/computing/email/