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Email Clients

An email client is software, usually running on the local workstation that interacts with the mail servers to allow the user to send & receive mail. Virtually all modern mail clients can use the SMTP protocol for sending and IMAP/POP for fetching mail. See the wikipedia page on comparison of email clients for a long list of tools.

You are free to use any client that you choose, but we recommend (& can provide support for) the following:

  • Thunderbird - brought to you by the good folk at Mozilla who describe their software "a free email application that's easy to set up and customize - and it's loaded with great features!" Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS, and LINUX.
  • Alpine was developed by the University of Washington & is described as "a fast, easy to use email client that is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding of power users." This is a curses-based TUI (a Text-based User Interface) which runs on pretty much any terminal or terminal emulator (ie xterm). This can be installed on a local Window, Linux, or Mac OS workstation & is also available as a command line application on our login servers.
  • Apple Mail for Mac OS only.
  • WebMail is a local installation of SquirrelMail a web-based mail interface that is useable from any browser at https://mail.phas.ubc.ca