A lot of people use Microsoft Outlook and with good reason. Outlook has been around a long time and does a very good job at all things calendar, contacts and emails.

But the main reason most of us know about Outlook is because it comes with Microsoft Office, not because everyone decided to go out and buy it. So Microsoft has done a very good job ensuring most people use Outlook.

Although Microsoft Outlook is a great email client, you do not have to use it. You can access your email pretty much through any email client you choose, and there are a lot of them out there.

I would like to introduce to use some alternative email clients. I have talked about Mozilla Thunderbird before which is a great free email client, so I am not going to go into that one again, in case you wonder why it is missing from the list.

Alpine

I try to blog about all things computers and try to include something for everyone, people old and new to computers.

Alpine will appeal to the geeky types and those who are familiar with working within the their computers terminal, the black screen with white writing you see hackers using in Hollywood movies.

Alpine is super lite and easy to use and setup.

It doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of other email clients and is 100% terminal interface.

For the pioneers of the internet who grew up using UNIX to access their email, you will be familiar with using this client as it is based on the old Pine system.

Balsa

Balsa is a fast email client which is very easy to setup and configure also.

Balsa has a great message handling system which enables you to make decisions on what you would like to do with your email, what can been and can’t and how to store your emails.

Balsa supports both IMAP and POP.

What I like most about Balsa though is how it allows you to customize your toolbar’s and allow you greater and quicker access to the functions you use the most.