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How do I decide between webmail and doing it offline?

In dial-up days it was a great advantage to have all your emails stored on a local computer, available when you were offline. Most people used Outlook Express (free with Windows) or Outlook (came with Microsoft Office).

The trouble was that the default location for your precious email data was an extremely stupid one - deep down in a hidden folder. Therefore lots of people could never backup their emails and would lose them all periodically. I even lost a few days worth once.

It's all  got rather confusing now if you want your emails stored locally. I kept ours in a sensible location, frequently backed up, in Outlook 2003. But  newer versions of Office don't include Outlook and Windows 7 ships with no email client at all. I now use Outlook offline, just to look at old emails - it was getting too messy trying to synchronise the Outlook database across two computers. The email account I used to use with Outlook now gets its emails collected by my gmail account, which can also send out emails that seem to come from that account. See the diagram below.

Now we're used to being online most of the time a computer is turned on and we may have multiple computers so web based email makes a lot of sense. There are privacy issues (they analyse all your mail so as to target adverts at you) but they are easy to ignore and it's good to have someone else taking care of backups. But there's always a lurking sense of unease about webmail - what if they suddenly refuse to let you log in or even go bust?

Perhaps the best way to approach the webmail or local client issue is to trump it and have both. Get a gmail account, set it to do IMAP synchronisation and hook up a local mail client, eg Thunderbird or Outlook. Then you can work locally offline and changes will be synchronised next time you're connected. Away from home you can always use gmail via a browser and again the changes will be synchronised to your local mail client when you next get connected. I set our laptop up that way, Thunderbird, IMAP and gmail and it was pretty simple except I had to import our contacts list separately. If Google ceased to exist I could carry on from Thunderbird with a different email provider.

Now that I use gmail for two different accounts (the gmail one plus the one I used to get to download to Outlook) all our emailing is web based:

In that diagram Outlook no longer sends nor receives emails - it is purely for looking at old emails. Thunderbird has a local copy of all our emails held by gmail. As soon as you run it on either of our computers it synchronises with gmail, ending up with a local copy of everything gmail has. We don't use it much because the gmail interface is better (see the comments on conversations below). Our yahoo webmail is just used as a secondary account. Our gmail account is the interesting one. Apart from its two way link with Thunderbird clients it collects all incoming mail for our gmail and chericbaker.co.uk accounts into one Inbox (but you can see which account each email was sent to). When sending mail it defaults to the chericbaker.co.uk account in the from box but there's a dropdown to let you send it from gmail instead.

So which is the best webmail?

Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail are the obvious top three. All free.

I've avoided Hotmail since it used to throw away sent mail in the old days. But lots of people seem happy with it. Its anti spam measures can be rather severe, though - I've been bounced several times sending mail to hotmail accounts and apparently they'll sometimes blacklist whole ISPs if they get spam from any of their users. They don't offer IMAP, either (Nov 2010). But it's now pretty easy to use and can even handle conversations like gmail. I believe it's better than gmail with attachments.

I do have a Gmail account and find it pretty easy to use. It also has a very accurate spam filter as I sometimes get waves of spam on that account (100+ per day). It also allows IMAP synchronisation with a local email client, eg Thunderbird. Gmail's very strong on searching your emails and you can assign one or more labels of your choice to each email. Then click on a label, say Holidays, and you'll only see emails tagged as holiday related. When you Archive emails they disappear from your Inbox but are still there when you click on All mail or do a search. Best of all is the way gmail handles 'conversations'. If you send someone an email then they reply to it then you reply back and so on, most email systems will litter your Inbox and Sent folders with multiple versions of the email and it's very hard to know if the latest is in Sent or Inbox. Gmail does it so much better - as long as the subject and from/to don't change it shows just a single version of the email and whether you look in Sent or Inbox you see the same complete, up to date version. Brilliant!

I closed a yahoo account a while back as it got too much spam but now I've got one again, just as a spare email account for signing up to shopping sites etc. No spam yet and the interface is quite good (but not as good as gmail). Apparently they do offer IMAP.

The email account to avoid is the one offered by your broadband supplier - use it and that is a big barrier to moving to a different supplier in future. Use Gmail or Hotmail and moving ISP or to a new computer is really simple. I do have an email account from my ISP, plusnet, but have never used it.

Why do I get spam?

The spammers are always looking out for genuine email addresses to plague. They get addresses from all over the place:

• robots search the web for tell-tale @ signs and automatically harvest the email addresses they find
• malware might invade the computer of someone with your email in their address list
• the spammers may break into a company's systems and steal customer email details (electronically or by bribing an employee)

So you haven't done anything wrong by getting spammed. If your email system filters spams effectively you can live with it. If not you can always abandon the email account and open a new one - but you'll still get contacts trying to use the dead one years later.

How can I back up important emails?

If they are stored locally backing up is vital. Find where your emails are stored, eg somewhere horribly hidden like:

If it's Outlook you simply back up the current pst file (which has all your emails, contacts, calendar etc). If you have a bit of time and are feeling brave why not look up how to move your Outlook pst file to somewhere more sensible - on the right is my solution. I used to use Synchpst to synchronise our Outlook database between laptop and desktop computers (before we abandoned Outlook). Then Carbonite to make online backups just in case.

If you use webmail backing up is done for you, although I'd still not trust all my emails being under the control of some giant foreign corporation. You can always 'print' important emails to a local disk as pdfs (eg with GreenPrint, see below) but the best option is probably to get a Gmail account and synchronise it with a local mail client with IMAP - that way Google makes backups for you but you've also got a local copy of everything. I do that, with our gmail account set to IMAP and Thunderbird as the local client on both our computers.

How do you insert a picture in an email?

You can send pictures as attachments. Basically it's a matter of not inflicting huge files on friends so you need to find a way of shrinking the images before sending them. I use Photoshop Elements but you can always use something free, eg Faststone Viewer:

In Outlook you can insert pictures directly into the text of the email. That keeps the email very small indeed - images are just transmitted at screen resolution. How the images display on receipt varies by email system. Gmail shows them very well, see below, but you can't do the same trick when sending from Gmail.

How do I create a pdf to email to people?

A pdf displays well on just about any device, is often far more compact than a Word document with images in it and is hard for most people to alter. So it's just to be viewed and/or printed it's much better to email a pdf than a Word document (which tends to display badly as an attachment and you should not in any case assume that everyone can view it).

Open Office can export pdfs and so can Office 2007 and 2010 if you download the plugin. Otherwise GreenPrint is free and can create reasonable pdfs from anything you can print. But I had it crashing a few times and now prefer PrimoPDF.