Easy-Email

Part 1

I studied marketing, I've never worked in IT, I realize I'm scared of computers and I think I make them go wrong... nobody else's computer seems to crash this often! Yet here I am working in an IT company. I justify this with our mission which is to simplify people's computer life – I'm all for simple. And that's why I get the pleasure of testing the instructions and asking stupid questions so hopefully you don't have to (ask too many questions). Luckily our resident IT guru is very patient...

Anyway, I've been reading the guides as they are written, and from the start I completely understood why someone who uses an email client such as Outlook needs to synchronize his or her emails (though I didn't know it was called an email client). I've been through that hassle and if I'd known about this solution at the time I would have had my brother over straight away to set it up for me!

I used to use Bigpond in Australia, as my internet provider at home and my email address. Then I moved house and switched to Gmail which was free and worked so much better but I realized I had to keep paying for the internet connection with Bigpond just so I could keep the same email address for a while and access it by webmail in case I missed any exciting or important emails... which of course I did because I didn't check it often enough – too much hassle logging in and out.

My work computer used Outlook so when I worked from home from my laptop I had to use a VPN which was sooo slow and kept dropping out. Sometimes I just gave up and called the office to get someone to log in to my email and send me the relevant email to my Gmail address... I hate to think how much time that took out of our day!

Now I'm working in a new business and we've set up the business email to forward to my Gmail so I can access both personal and work emails from Gmail which is brilliant! I didn't know you could do this but now I have a professional sounding email address and still use Gmail.

I wasn't convinced as to why someone who uses webmail would need to synchronize their email. Granted, being a technophobe, I avoid doing anything new on a computer until I absolutely have to so I take a lot of convincing! So Gmail seemed all fine to me... until this morning... no internet access for the past 4 hours! How did we live?!

It's not so much about the incoming emails, I'm sure they can wait a few hours but I have to prepare for a meeting and need to read back through the relevant emails; I'm supposed to be translating a presentation for a friend and it's an attachment in an email I can't get at; I'm expecting a delivery but I don't know at what time and I can't call the guy because his number is in my emails so the dog will have to make do with a walk across the road and back.

This is all extremely frustrating and it's stuff I could be working on offline if I could just access the original emails!

So maybe this happened today so I can write some convincing copy as to why we all need to synchronize our emails. I'm off to download Thunderbird...

regards,

the technophobe

Part 2

So I downloaded Thunderbird, did the Gmail essential part and was very proud of myself because I even removed the filters the IT guru had set up for me and set up my own! Then I synchronized with Thunderbird and it all worked fine, in fact I was surprised how easy it was... funny how when we actually face up to something it's much easier than we imagined!  I then promptly forgot about it and continued to use Gmail. But then a month later my internet was down and properly down this time, I had to wait for an engineer to come out and I live in a small village so we aren't high priority!

Anyway, even not having used Thunderbird for weeks, there was all my email up till the point where I lost the internet connection. Thunderbird had been working away in the background downloading copies of my email.  It was brilliant!  I could still open attachments in my email, compose new messages, answer old messages but not send yet.  The engineer came, I sent the emails and went straight back to using Gmail!

The thing is, it's very comforting to know that my emails are all there on my computer whenever I need them. I'm thinking about a time we had an important meeting with a possible source of finance for our business. I had written down the address of the meeting but had completely forgotten the person's name! Complete blank. I was carrying my laptop and if I'd done this sooner I could have easily looked it up. As it was I had to phone the guy who had set up the meeting for us which was a bit embarassing...

cheers,

the technophobe

What's your experience?

So that was my experience. We'd love to hear yours.  Please send us any feedback when you set up Easy-Email.

Or you can even send me details of your current email setup and I'll explain with a diagram how it will work for you. 

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