Gmail - Not Your Usual Email Client
Gmail - Not Your Usual Email Client
If you use Gmail for your email, including setting it up to receive email from your other email accounts, you may find the item linked below this message useful. Gmail does not function as a stand-alone email tool. The biggest point of confusion has to do with the concept of
folders used on stand alone email tools versus Gmail's use of
labels.
When one starts using Gmail they find many copies of an email with various labels and assume that many copies of that message exist. Actually only one copy exists, but it appears in many labels (not folders) you may have created. The only place all email can be seen is by using the All Mail option in your Gmail box. In other words, a single email message in Gmail can have multiple labels that will appear in the list of labels you create using Gmail. If you actually delete that message having many labels, it will disappear from all the other labeled areas. This usually causes much dismay to folks who do not understand how Gmail stores messages and think a
label is actually a
folder storing a duplicate copy of the email.
I like Gmail and use it for all of my email accounts. But, the one worry about Gmail is personal backup. If you use a stand-alone email tool (a
client that communicates with an email
server) you can easily backup all your email messages. With Gmail you must rely upon Google to keep your emails safe and recoverable. I use
eM Client as a stand-alone email tool to have the ability to actually download all of my email messages residing on Google's servers.
eM Client has a nice backup feature that creates a zip archive of all messages that I can backup (I use
InSync) should Google's email system go awry. I also have it set up to import all of my other email accounts messages, just as does Gmail. Most of the time I just use eM Client and never actually open Gmail in my browser. This helps me live comfortably with the notion of folders that actually store a message versus the use of Gmail's concept of labels. This allows me to actually store multiple actual copies of emails in various folders I have created.
So given eM Client and Gmail, why have both? Other than the one computer with eM Client installed, I have several computers at home so on any of them I can open Gmail in a browser and still see all of my email. I could even access my Gmail on any computer on the road while traveling, too, or on my Kindle when away from the house at a coffee shop.
For more about how Gmail functions, see:
http://gmail-miscellany.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-gmail-stores-your-mail.html
AMR
