Mail How-to
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Detailed configuration for your client (not all available in english language at the moment):
Use Thunderbird + GPG!!!
For anyone who has not grasped yet the basical notions of e-mail, we will try to explain in few lines what it means to use a mailbox.
A mailbox is something like having a postman in your computer: you write a letter, send it to an address and it will be delivered thanks to the interaction between your e-mail server (a server is the machine managing this service) and your recipient's server.
Having an e-mail account means that you have a name and an address for having mail sent to you and for sending mail.
There are basically two ways for reading your mail: watching it in the web with a browser (Netscape, Konqueror, Galeon, Explorer, Opera and so on) or downloading it in your pc through what is called an e-mail client (a program such as Netscape Messenger, Kmail, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express, Eudora etc.), a program which can communicate with your server and fetching your mails to your pc.
If you are using an e-mail client, mail will be downloaded in your computer in either way: either via POP3, actually downloading your messages in your computer to read them there, or via IMAP, which allows you to download the heading of your message and to decide which messages you really want to download and read.
If you don't know which method you prefer, just try them both to be sure! ;)))
Obviously besides sending mails you can also receive them, both through a web browser or from your computer. In the second case your e-mail client will use another service offered by any mail server, namely SMTP, which helps the server to receive your letter and forward to the addressee.
What is noteworthy is that all these trasfers do not generally take place in an encrypted way: the messages travel through the net and across every node in plain and with no protection at all. It is not unreal to think that if someone ever wanted to control you they would not find it more difficult to tap these messages than to pick up flyers from the sidewalk ;) - therefore your e-mails may be easily compared to simple postcards.
To reduce this risk (NB: this will not totally inhibit controls, but it can restrict them), you can download and send your mail via SSL, that is in an encrypted (encoded) way. Not all servers support this possibility, though.
Please note that there are more effective ways to anonymize your mail exchanges and to defend your privacy, namely by using encryption instruments like PGP, GnuPG and other services offered by this server such us Anonymous Remailer.
Of course you can also manage your mail by web via SSL using a particular secure communication protocol called https and supported by any browser.