Comparison of email browsers and their search capabilities
Name
Madis Raud
Abstract
The way people interact with each other has changed drastically during last few decades. Daily face to face communication has decreased due to a chance to catch anyone anywhere on a phone or through electronic communication over different media devices like MSN messenger or Skype. Writing and sending regular mail is losing its purpose and disappearing, it has come down to being an old and traditional medium for sending postcards for Christmas and other celebrations. Whether it is communication in workplace or everyday private life most people have switched from regular mail to email. That kind of change in our way of communication is brought to us by our own comfortable and fast pace lives. Sending and communicating over emails has become so popular that without email account it is hard to cope in our society. Even my 75 year old grandma was compelled to create an email account and learn to use it. In work environment sending emails has become almost irreplaceable medium. It is usual that in a day one might have to read and answer to anywhere between ten to fifty emails which means that in one year the number of emails received is from 2000 to 10 000. As a college student I can find over 11000 emails from my mailbox and 10 000 of them I received in last three years. In 2010 I received little bit over 3400 emails and sent out 1500.
The Institute of Computer Science in University of Tartu is involved in research of social networks and how to orienteer in email accounts with such capacity [1, 2]. The goal of my work is to compare and test the existing email clients search capabilities, qualities and ease of use. In the first section I will explain the differences of popular email forwarding protocols and how these effect users email browsing. Since there are hundreds of different email browsers, I have selected six most popular ones. In the second and third section I will give a short review of these email clients and compare their search capabilities and how fast and easy it is to use them because in working environment it is important that finding a certain letter or document from tens of thousands of other emails is fast and easy. In the fourth section I will put the different email clients to a test, to see which of these give us most accurate answers. With my work I hope to clarify if today’s search capabilities are sufficient and efficient to work with such capacities and to find out which email clients/browsers handle that the best.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Computer Science
Supervisor(s)
Tõnu Tamme, Vambola Leping
Defence year
2012