During 2024, the world sent and received over 360 billion emails every day. Most of these were spam or automated messages. But emails also help us keep in touch with our friends and colleagues, deliver the latest news, tell us about trends, and much more. 

Despite decades of efforts to replace email, it remains one of our most popular and widely used forms of digital communication. 

For most of email's early years, we accessed our messages by downloading them to a desktop application on a PC or laptop. By the early 2000s, brands like BlackBerry popularised using phones to check our emails, and soon after that, web-based email clients became very popular. 

Today, you can use all these methods to check your emails. Which is the best choice for you? Let's look at their benefits and risks. 

How email works 

Email is one of the internet's original technologies, with the first examples appearing in the late 1960s. As the name reveals, email is literally 'electronic mail': a batch of text, a letter, sent across computer networks, primarily the internet, by using standardised technologies and protocols. 

You compose a message and send it to an email server, which uses the email address to route the message across the internet to the recipient's mail server. The messages are kept on an email server until someone retrieves them. Retrieval can mean making copies of the messages or moving them to a local computer—this is the fundamental difference between desktop email and other forms of email. 

Today, we can read out emails on our computers, phones, or almost any device with a modern browser. 

Desktop email 

With desktop email, you use software on your computer to download your email. Typically, this means the messages are removed from the email server and now only exist on your computer, though a server can be set to keep copies of emails. 

The risk is that if your computer is lost or your hard drive crashes, you can lose all those emails forever. If you store many emails, it can reduce your computer's performance (especially if you also download lots of email file attachments). 

But desktop email has advantages. Benefits include easy backups and access to downloaded emails even without an internet connection (though you can't send or receive new emails until your connection is restored.)  

Mobile and web email 

Mobile and web email share many characteristics, so we can discuss them together. 

Mobile email uses an app to download emails to your phone. But unlike a desktop client, they don't keep the messages permanently or remove them from the email server. While you can usually access those emails even if you are offline, the mobile app will save space on your device by limiting how many emails it stores. 

Web email runs through a browser. You go to a website and log in, then read the messages directly on the server, where they remain. You don't store copies on your computer or phone, but some services allow offline access. 

There are several benefits to using a mobile app or web portal. You won't lose emails if something happens to your device because all the emails are still on the email server. On the other hand, only a few of these services offer backup features, and you might need a third-party backup service to make archive copies. 

Which email client is better? 

Mobile email and web email are better because you can access your emails without removing them from the server. If something happens to your device, you won't lose your emails, and they won't take up much computer space. The second benefit is that you can access your email from multiple devices: you can use a web portal through a browser or an email app on your phone. 

However, it's easier to make backups of your email with a desktop client. If you have important messages, you can copy them from the server and make a backup file. This process is slightly technical but not very hard, and there are great open-source clients that specialise in creating email backups. Some online email services also let you download backups. 

The most convenient option to access email is to use an online email service such as Outook on Microsoft 365. The service hosts the email server, and you can access your messages through web email, mobile apps, or a desktop client. 

This way, you don't worry about running a server or running out of space, as webmail services such as Outlook Web App and Google Workspace have pretty generous storage. If you have important emails you want to keep, contact your provider about backup options. 

Whichever option you go for, it will work better on a stable and secure internet connection. Check out these Vodacom Fibre deals for some cost-effective options.