“On the PC Side”

Column 3: Web Mail or “Local” Mail?

Many USC retirees receive and send e-mail via USC Web Mail.  All that is required is an Internet connection, a USC computer account with username and password, and an Internet browser (such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox) to reach the home page at email.usc.edu.  The browser enables you to display incoming messages as well as to reply or to compose and send new messages.

What you may not know is that your Web mail messages—outgoing and incoming—reside only on one of the university’s servers.  A server is a centrally-located, large-capacity computer roughly analogous to what we used to call a mainframe computer.  The personal computer that you use to view and create e-mail is functioning like the “dumb terminals” that we once used to send commands to the mainframe.

There is another way to receive and send e-mail.  You can do both “locally,” that is, on your personal computer.  Rather than opening your Internet browser and going to email.usc.edu, you can run a program (such as Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express, Qualcomm’s Eudora, or Mozilla’s Thunderbird) that handles e-mail directly on your PC.  After you initially enter your computer account information and some other information about the USC servers in the designated place in one of these programs, the software itself will automatically send your username and password to the server and then transfer your incoming messages from the server to your personal computer’s hard disk drive.  If you leave this software running, it will automatically check for new incoming e-mail at intervals that you set and will notify you when messages have arrived from the server.  When you reply to a message or send a new one, the software will automatically transfer the new message from your PC (leaving the original message on your hard drive) to the outgoing server which will then send your message on its way.

Which is better, Web mail or "local" mail?  If you are away from home (or office) and are checking your e-mail with a computer that is not your own, Web mail is fine.  Any computer with Internet access and a browser will do.  (Of course, you will have to remember your username and password, the latter sometimes being a challenge if you have changed it recently!)  Otherwise, the advantages of handling your e-mail on your PC are numerous.  For one thing, you can configure e-mail programs such as Outlook Express and Thunderbird to receive e-mail from several different servers.  For example, say that you have both a USC computer account with a USC e-mail address and an e-mail account with an outside Internet Service Provider such as EarthLink.  Rather than visiting two separate Web mail sites to view and manage your e-mail, your PC software can handle both e-mail accounts for you.  Second, processing your e-mail locally on your PC allows you to avoid the constraints imposed on Web mail accounts such as the number of messages that you can store on external servers and the number of addresses in your server-based addressbook.  Third, PC e-mail software provides a second level of protection against spam.  In addition to any spam filters in place on your Web mail’s servers, programs such as Thunderbird can divert “junk mail” away from your inbox, to be viewed and disposed of as you wish.  Another feature of PC e-mail programs is that they give you the option of leaving incoming messages on the server (for you to delete manually later) or automatically deleting them from the server after they have been transferred to your PC.  If you opt for the latter configuration, you do not have to visit your Web mail site merely to clean out your inbox.

If you interested in giving “local” e-mail a try, Mozilla’s Thunderbird is available free of charge at www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/.  Instructions for how to configure Thunderbird to handle your e-mail may be found at USC’s Information Technology Services (ITS, formerly ISD) Web page at the following link.

If you have questions or comments about this column, send them to Bob Stallings at rstallin@usc.edu.

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