Webmail is intended as a convenience when you are on the road and need to quickly check on your email until you get back in the office and can retrieve the emails into your own desktop email program.
Webmail has limited space available because it shares the total quota for space that includes your website disk space, your website's databases and all of the other people in your company that are also using Webmail. If you have a 100MB hosting account then everyone in your company has to make sure that their emails do not total more than 100MB "collectively" and since many emails contain attachments that are quite big it doesn't take much more than a few large emails to exceed your disk quota for webmail. This is not practical in a busy office. Each employee should be able to receive and manage as much email as they need to.
Many people solve this by using desktop programs such as Outlook. I know some of you can't justify the cost of Outlook. You are not alone.
The Mozilla foundation has created a free, wonderful, Outlook alternative called Thunderbird which will allow you to receive emails from multiple webmail accounts and have each one of them sorted in separate folders within Thunderbird and allow you to send from each separate account from your desktop depending on your choice on a per email basis. It also has a nice Calendar extension that can be added easily. =========================================================================== You can download Thunderbird here - http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
It installs in a few minutes and is a pleasure to use and it is free and legal.
Once installed and setup properly it will download all unread emails from your webmail account and then it will clear out your webmail account freeing up the space on the server again for the next emails you need to receive. It will check your webmail account every 15 minutes and download any new ones for you to view and respond to as needed. It will keep doing this as long as it runs on your desktop.
If you are on the road and would like the convenience of webmail without using the desktop application then close Thunderbird while you are out of the office and the webmail will keep your emails for you to view and respond to. Once you return to your office - start Thunderbird again and it will download those emails into your desktop location for a nice consolidated version of all of your emails. It will then clean up your webmail account again. =========================================================================== If any of you would like to add its Calendaring feature then do the following:
Install Calendar on Mozilla Thunderbird If you want to install the extension in Thunderbird, you have to follow these steps:
In your default browser, right-click on the download link for your Mozilla Thunderbird release. Choose the "Save link to disk..." option and download the XPI install file into a directory of your choosing. Open Mozilla Thunderbird and open the 'Extensions' dialog by going to the 'Tools' -> 'Extensions' menu. On the Extension dialog, there's a button named 'Install' in the lower right corner. Click on it and browse to the directory where you saved the Calendar xpi. Choose the file you downloaded earlier on and click 'OK'. ===========================================================================
