Feedback Request: Web Based Email

For my group of employees, the more general explanation would be more helpful. Though you have great explanatory videos for concepts, your format doesn't really allow for in-dept training, which is how I see the features of email being presented. At my workpace, we have Lotus Notes based email on our desktops, but we also have Webmail for when we are away from our desks. Just explaining to my staff that this is the same email content but a different interface is a challenge. Thanks!

Just looking at this again and had another thought; with the popularity of mobile devices, this might also explain how you can check email from a web app, your phone, your tablet, etc. -- each with a different interface -- and then still get it on your laptop at home. And why it disappears sometimes after you've checked it at home, if you have it downloaded from the server. Just some more ideas.

Lee,

I know too many people who are locked into the desktop-based approach via Exchange, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc., and don't see what is essentially the primary cloud-based application that web-based email provides.

Corporate entities, however, have certain legal requirements about archiving company emails, and they're often told that something like Exchange is the only way to do it, which is simply not true. They're also told that the security of web-based emails is much lower than that of in-house mail servers and desktop email clients, which may have some truth but it's not the whole story. Google Apps for Business and for Education, for example, offer a more secure and archivable Gmail client than their standard product.

I know you'd prefer to remain as application-independent in your explanations as possible, but even with web-based email, it will probably require a mention of the features currently available, and therefore a mention of brand-specific features that differentiate the market. These are not the same as how-to's for those features that the other video approach would require, but rather a recognition of how deeply web-based email has become integrated into a variety of hardware and software products.

Furthermore, as Dropbox, Springpad, Google Drive, et al., evolve into shared cloud-spaces, the concept of email may be changing, too, especially for personal networks. With social media acting as alerting devices, people can know when to check their shared cloud folders for documents that have been put there by others, including formatted old-fashioned letters! This short-circuits the spam that standard email users must often wade through.