2024-03-05 18:06:54
Email has been part of everyday life for two decades – and yet there are functions that are unknown. We have put together the best tips for you.
The most important things at a glance
There aren’t many things on the Internet that have endured as long as email. Although the first electronic letter was sent in 1971, the email principle is still relevant even after more than 50 years.
With these tips, everyday life with electronic messages can be optimized or made safer:
Bring emails home
This can be done with so-called email clients. These programs offer more features than ever. In addition, setting them up is much easier than before, explains Jörg Geiger from the “Chip” specialist magazine. If you have an account with a major email provider, you often only have to enter your email address and password. Complete. Servers, ports and even more cryptic information are usually no longer necessary.
If necessary, several mail accounts can be used in one client at the same time. The messages can be filtered or sorted automatically. And above all, the emails can be “freed” from the mail provider’s server and backed up and archived on the computer at home or on an external storage medium.
Geiger recommends the free email client Thunderbird from Mozilla, which, like the Firefox browser, is constantly being developed and is available for Windows and MacOS as well as Linux.
But mail programs such as Windows Mail or Apple Mail, which come with the operating systems from Microsoft and Apple, are also sufficient for private users, says Geiger. In any case, you don’t have to spend money on an email client. A paid alternative is Outlook from Microsoft.
Manage email messages
Many users have old email addresses that they barely use. If you don’t want to constantly log in to check, there are two other functions available in addition to the mail client: automatic forwarding and collection.
Most free email providers offer automatic forwarding. However, according to Geiger, the function has disadvantages: After forwarding, the name of the original sender is no longer in the sender field, but rather the name of the person who forwarded the email.
It is therefore more elegant to collect emails. With the function, which is also called, for example, email import or collection service, a mail account retrieves messages from one or more other mailboxes after a certain time and saves them. The automatic forwarding or the collection service can – if available – be activated in the settings of the mail account.
Send email attachments
As a rule, large amounts of data cannot be sent via email. With Gmail, the total attachment cannot be larger than 25 megabytes (MB). For free email accounts from Web.de or GMX, for example, the maximum size may not exceed 20 MB.
For larger attachments, a trick is required: the best way to share them is via online storage, i.e. via services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Just add the download link to the email.
However, users should generally consider what they send as attachments, advises Prof. Christian Dörr, who heads the cybersecurity department at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. “The email is technically a postcard,” he explains. Sensitive data such as a copy of your ID card should not be sent unencrypted.
For more sensitive data, Dörr recommends a free service from the Dutch telecommunications group KPN (Filetransfer.kpn.com). This allows users to upload up to four gigabytes (GB) of data without an account or registration and encrypted with a password.
For transfer services that do not encrypt, Jörg Geiger recommends the following procedure: With free packing programs such as 7-Zip, files can also be encrypted using a password when compressing and thus secured. Such encrypted zip files can then be shared safely via unencrypted online storage or transfer services.
If you want to send larger amounts of data that are zipped and encrypted or do not require any special protection without an account or registration with an online storage service, you can use services such as “Wetransfer.com” (free up to 2 GB), “Transfernow.net” (free up to 5 GB) or “Swisstransfer.com” (free up to 50 GB). Here, too, you will receive a download link to share after uploading. The providers delete the data again after a few days.