What's the difference between an email
account, an email address, an email program and an email service?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here with a bucket full
of confusing terms about email, it's no wonder people get confused.
Here's just one example question that illustrates the point.
"I want to change my email program from Hotmail to something else, how to do?"
Well, the problem is Hotmail is not a program.
Hotmail is a service.
Let's define those terms to start
with and then look at some of the confusion that can arise.
An email service is the company, the servers that they own and the software
that they run that handles your e-mail en route to its destination.
An email account
is your relationship with an email service and all of the storage and the features
and the functionality that might be included.
An email address is what uniquely
identifies your mailbox as provided by your e-mail service.
An email program
is software that you run and download on your computer to manage email.
Four very different yet very related
things, so, for example, with our question: "change your email program from Hotmail",
that question just literally does not make sense.
Hotmail is not a program.
Hotmail is a service.
So you might want to change your email
service from Hotmail to Google Mail or to Yahoo!
Mail or Proton or whatever.
There are many valuable services.
You're not changing a program.
You're not installing anything on your computer.
You're not changing what's installed on your computer.
You're simply changing what email service you want to use.
And the answer to the question,
by the way, is you go to that service and you sign up and create an account,
and then you tell all your friends your new email address that resulted from using
a new email service and eventually you stop using your old email at Hotmail.
It's pretty simple,
but again, terminology matters, and so get a couple of other really
confusing issues that come up time and time again,
confusion, number one, e-mail programs versus websites.
We've basically run smack into this one with our question.
An email program is something like Microsoft Office's Outlook or Thunderbird
or the mail program that comes preinstalled on Windows 10.
Email Web sites are Web sites like
Outlook.Com or Gmailcom. Or mail.yahoocom. In order to access those
Web sites, the program that you run is your Web browser,
Edge or Chrome or Firefox, and you go to one of those URLs to manage your mail.
EThe email programs don't use a browser at all.
They are programs that you run on your PC to manage your e-mail.
But the alternative approach is to fire up your Web browser and go to the Web site
that allows you to manage your email directly online.
Now, confusion number two, Gmail.Com.
Is it an email service, an account, an address, a website?
Well, it's kind of sort of some or all
of the above, depending on what you're talking about.
Gmail.Com is the Web site that is
associated with Google's Google Mail service.
While Google Mail can be delivered via other domains, it's safe to think of Gmail
without the dotcom as being relatively synonymous with Google Mail.
So, yeah, we tend to think of Gmail as a service and Gmail.Com as a Web site.
Gmail.Com is not enough to identify an email account or an address.
It's not until we add a name like
Askleoexample to @Gmail dot com that we get an email address.
Google uses email addresses to uniquely identify Google accounts,
which has access to many different services in addition to email.
The same is true for your Microsoft account, which is typically using an email
address that's been issued to you by Microsoft.
Gmail.com is not a program.
It is, however, a website you can visit to access the email associated with your
email account, the program you would use in your Web browser.
Confusion number three, Outlook versus Outlook versus Outlook.
Microsoft,
there's no love lost for their ability to pick really confusing names,
Outlook and Outlook.com are two different things and they're unrelated.
In fact, the only thing that they really
relate on is that they're both somehow involved with email.
It used to be worse. Outlook Express, of course,
was another email program that was unrelated to Outlook that comes
with Microsoft Office but is still an email program.
And both are unrelated to Outlook.com, which is a Web site and an email service
offered by Microsoft that allows you to set up an email address.
You access Outlook.com by firing up
your browser, you access Outlook the program by running Outlook on your PC.
It's confusing and it's so confusing
that one of the very first responses I end up giving to almost any question
that talks about having a problem with Outlook is which Outlook did you mean?
Outlook.Com, the website or Outlook
the program that comes with Microsoft Office.
Thank you, Microsoft.
So here are a couple of scenarios
that make the differences a little bit more clear.
And they're actually scenarios where these questions tend to come up all the time.
First, moving machines.
Let's say you're using an email program
like Thunderbird or Outlook that comes with Microsoft Office.
You would install the program on your new machine.
You would move your email messages
and your contact list from your old machine to your new machine.
You would configure the program to access
your email accounts online, which means telling it your email address
and other configuration information as provided by your email service.
And then you'd start downloading any new
email on your new machine and stop downloading email on your old.
It's a little bit of work, a little complicated,
especially the transferring contacts part, but depending on the email program you're
using, it actually doesn't have to be that horribly difficult when it comes to ease.
I'd probably recommend Thunderbird because it really is just moving one folder
of information from one PC to the next and you're back up and running.
Now, if you're using Web based email, which means, for example, like me,
you go to Gmail.com in order to read your email and your Web browser.
Well.
Moving to a new machine is super simple., you open your Web browser
on the new machine, you go to your email provider's Web site
like Gmail.com, and you read your email.
You didn't have to do anything.
Email isn't on your PC, so you don't have to move anything.
All you do is access it on the web.
Now moving accounts, I want to change my email program
from Hotmail to something else in my mind, says that that person is really trying
to get a new email address with a service other than Hotmail.com.
So, for example, you would then create a new account with that new service.
This will give you a new email address.
If you use a PC based email program, you would then configure that program
to access this email, this new email address
using the configuration information that was provided by your new email service.
If you used Web based email,
you would just use your browser to sign in to the Web based new email account.
So, again, if it's Gmail,
you just go to Gmail.com and there's your new email address.
You then, of course,
tell all of your friends, your business relations,
your newsletter subscriptions about your new email address and start sending
and receiving your email using your new email service.
Keep an eye on the old one for a while,
however long that is, until any email basically slowed
to a trickle, if any, at which point you can stop paying attention to it.
I don't recommend closing it just because
there's always something that comes in long after you expected it and closing
it really doesn't accomplish what most people want it to accomplish anyway.
So that's how you would move from one email account, email address to another.
In summary, it really is no surprise
that people get confused because the terms are confusing,
they are used inconsistently by different places and different companies.
And of course, there are people like
Microsoft out there who are, for whatever reason,
explicitly choosing terms that further confuse exactly what's what.
Unfortunately, when it comes to computers,
and particularly when asking for help, terminology matters.
The more you know, the clearer you can be,
the more you understand what it is you're talking about,
the better the chances of getting the right answer from the right people.
I hope that helps explain a little bit about why and why it's so important
for updates, for related links, for comments and much more, visit Askleo.com/4436.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.