Partner Article

Everlasting support for email

How using an advanced email client has helped busy parish priest Jeremy Hummerstone to sort, save and store his messages more easily and effectively

I used to use Mozilla’s Thunderbird software as my email application because I had tried Outlook and Outlook Express and found them too complicated. For a while it worked well – until I wanted to move and organise my messages. Everything I needed was hidden away in places where I wouldn’t think to look. On top of that, retrieving messages involved getting to grips with curious self-generating codes that were hard to work out or change.

Unfortunately, worse was still to come: what prompted me to abandon Thunderbird altogether was an incident that led to thousands of emails disappearing for good.

Unknown to me, the software had compressed all my emails into one huge camouflaged file. A message then popped up telling me they needed ‘archiving’ – and I obediently agreed. This resulted in the file being corrupted and all the emails being irretrievably lost. Fortunately, most of my parishioners didn’t use email, but the loss of correspondence with bishops, archdeacons and other luminaries was very frustrating.

I discovered that standard email clients such as Outlook and Gmail store messages, attachments, calendar data and contacts within a single database file. As the file grows in size, this can lead to loss of performance. In some cases, the application will simply freeze, unable to handle the large volume of data in a single file. And in the event that it gets lost or corrupted, all emails, attachments, calendars and contacts may be lost.

As an untrained office worker with some experience using Windows, ultimately all I needed was a simple programme which I could customise to work for me. So I decided to try EverDesk because it was the only tool I could find that stored messages transparently in accessible folders.

An advanced email client, the software avoids performance issues by processing and storing messages and documents as separate files in regular Windows folders, which also makes working with the data more straightforward.

Now, finding, moving, editing and – most importantly of all – backing-up my messages is easy. From being a prolific letter writer, I have become a prolific message-sender, for which my current, advanced email client has become indispensable. Since signing up for the tool, I have been absolutely delighted with it. When I have got into a jam, or have failed to understand something, I’ve always been given rapid help from the support team.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jeremy Hummerstone .