Web-based email has never been so popular yet there are plenty of headaches associated with having to be online to read your messages. Even the best cloud services out there struggle to replicate the ease of use that desktop-based clients bring, whether it be easily backing up emails, accessing attachments offline, or simply offering the same flexibility when it comes to capacity.

We’ve tested some of the most popular email clients to see which offer the most well-rounded experience for users, including software performance, feature set, and their ease of use.

eM Client

www.emclient.com

Price: Free

With a smart-looking, modern interface and plenty of advanced features, eM Client is easily the best email software for Windows PCs.

Calendar, contacts and tasks are all integrated and there’s even built-in support for chat (via Facebook, Google or Jabber). Setting up accounts is very straightforward – most popular email services are automatically recognised and configured without you having to faff around with SMTP server settings and suchlike. If you’re switching from another email program, eM Client will helpfully offer to import data from your old application, and if you’re using an Outlook.com or Gmail account, your calendar and contacts will be automatically synced, too.

The client can be switched to a stylish Dark theme

eM Client’s default interface should feel instantly familiar – it uses the tried-and-tested, three-column (folder list, message list, preview pane) layout. But the program doesn’t look old-fashioned and you can customise its layout to suit your tastes by clicking Menu, Tools, Settings, Appearance – we prefer the stylish Dark theme. It’s also possible to switch Conversation view off, if you prefer.

Notable features include a super-fast search, advanced filtering tools, templates, signatures, tags and the ability to categorise mail using colour-coding. There’s even a built-in translator, which uses Bing’s translation engine.

The latest version of eM Client (7.1) adds a number of useful new features, including an improved backup tool that can automatically back up your data in the background, and support for PGP encryption.

How it can be improved

The free version of eM Client only supports two mail accounts. If you need more than that, you’ll have to pay for the Pro version, which costs £36 (or £72 if you want lifetime upgrades to future versions). After the 30-day trial, you’ll need to apply to eM Client for a free license to keep using it for free, which seems like an unnecessary step. There’s currently no integration with Windows 10’s Action Centre – instead you’re alerted to new mail via eM Client’s own Notification area icon pop-up.

Verdict

Quibbles aside, eM Client easily beats the competition. It offers a great balance of simplicity and adaptability, while its familiarity makes it a great replacement for older tools, such as Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail.

Features: 5

Performance: 5

Ease of use: 5

Overall: 5

Mozilla Thunderbird

www.thunderbird.net

Price: Free

Thunderbird is a resolutely old-school email program that offers support for multiple POP and IMAP accounts, and provides easy set-up for popular services, such as Gmail and Outlook.com.

You can configure it so that it looks and works how you want it to, and there are loads of features, including powerful filtering tools, an RSS reader and instant messaging. Like Mozilla’s more famous web browser, Thunderbird’s abilities can be expanded further by installing add-ons – anything from alternative themes to mail merge tools, password managers and more – though many ‘legacy’ extensions are being phased out. The once-optional Lightning add-on is now integrated into the program, meaning that calendar and tasks features are now built in.

How it can be improved:

Thunderbird lacks native Exchange support, meaning some accounts (including Outlook.com ones) don’t get the full range of features. There’s no support for Windows 10’s Action Centre, either – so there are no native Windows 10 notifications.

Mozilla has made no secret of the fact that its struggling to justify Thunderbird’s ongoing development. Last year Mozilla found a way to keep Thunderbird alive by separating it from its core business and new features have been promised, but its future is far from guaranteed.

Verdict

With plenty of built-in features and many more available through add-ons, Thunderbird is highly versatile, though its ageing interface and lack of support for some newer standards are disappointing – and may never be fixed.

Features: 4

Performance: 4

Ease of use: 4

Overall: 4

Microsoft Mail app

www.microsoft.com

Windows 10’s built-in apps tend to come in for a bit of a knocking, but Mail is actually pretty good. It has a nice, clean interface, supports most account types (including POP and IMAP) and is refreshingly simple to set up and use.

Its close integration into the OS has a number of benefits, including a live tile in the Start menu and a cross-app relationship with the People (contacts) and Calendar apps. Microsoft keeps improving the Mail app, too. Last year it added a Focused Inbox feature for Gmail users, for example (click Settings, Reading to toggle this on or off). On touch-screen devices, the app’s intuitive Swipe Action controls are an added bonus.

How it can be improved:

Some of Mail’s tools are a little too simplistic – there’s no filtering, for example, and it only supports plain text signatures (though you can hack it by adding in your own HTML code). Also, since Mail is tied so closely to the OS, its reliability can be affected by Windows 10 updates. We’ve experienced problems like these first-hand and many user reviews on the app’s Windows Store page would suggest that we’re not alone.

Verdict

If simplicity is what you’re after, look no further – Mail’s already installed on your PC and is a piece of cake to set up. That said, you may find its lack of features frustrating.

Features: 3

Performance: 4

Ease of use: 5

Overall: 4

Best of the rest

Microsoft Outlook (www.microsoft.com)

If you subscribe to Office 365 (from £5.99 per month or £60 per year), you get Outlook with it, which is an email client, calendar tool, contacts manager and to-do list all in one. Outlook offers a lot of advanced tools, including a powerful Rules function, fast search and built-in archiving tools. But, these days, Outlook feels like overkill – there are simpler tools available for free.

Mailbird Lite (www.getmailbird.com)

Mailbird Lite feels a little like Microsoft’s Mail app on steroids. It looks great and has the ability to connect to popular apps and services, including WhatsApp, Slack and Facebook, as well as the usual email accounts. The free version of Mailbird restricts you to a single email account and lacks some of the full program’s better tools, such as attachment previewing and email snoozing. Adding these will cost you £19.50.

Postbox (www.postbox-inc.com)

Postbox’s interface is uncluttered and should feel familiar. RSS feeds and newsgroups are supported but, strangely, there’s no built-in calendar. Some of the program’s more innovative tools include automated responses and placeholders, which can save time if you find yourself frequently sending similar replies. The big drawback is that Postbox isn’t free. Beyond the 30-day free trial you’ll need to pay – currently it’s $40 (£29) for the full version.

Image: Shutterstock

It’s much more than just a search engine these days, but the data Google gleans from its users’ search history and other activities is still central to the company’s continued success.

Collecting and using other people’s information is Google’s bread and butter, providing it with the ultimate advertising commodity – the ability to target specific people – and effectively funding the many ‘free’ services the company offers.

In its privacy policy, Google says “we use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones and to protect Google and our users”.

But that’s only half the story. It’s also using your data to boost the effectiveness of its own business. The more user data it has, the more accurately it can target adverts – and the more powerful it becomes.

Google has tried to address privacy concerns by providing more transparency on how and why it uses people’s data, and by inviting users to view and control this information. The trouble is, there are dozens of different settings scattered around various web pages and devices. In this section, we’ll point you straight at the Google settings you need to change.

Your search and web activity

You probably won’t be too shocked by the fact that Google stores and uses data from your web searches. Even still, viewing everything the company has recorded about your web activities (by signing in with your Google account) is quite an eye-opener.

Your activity is shown as a vertical timeline and, depending on how many Google-related tools, services and devices you use, you could be presented with a list of not only every Google search you’ve performed, but also every site you’ve visited in Chrome, every route you’ve planned in Google Maps, every Android app you’ve ever used and more besides, all stretching back years.

Erase your Google search history by choosing the date range, then clicking delete

Thankfully, My Activity lets you control how much of this data Google stores. You can search for specific items or scroll back through your history to find something you want to delete. Click an item for more details, then click the three vertical dots button in the pop-up windows and click Delete, then click Delete again to remove the item from your history.

Alternatively, you can delete data in bulk by clicking the three vertical dots button in the top right-hand corner of the main page and selecting ‘Delete activity by’. Here, you can select the date range and the Google service (Search, for example) you want to delete data for from the drop-down menus, and click Delete, then Delete again. Or, if you want to get rid of the whole lot, select ‘All time’ and ‘All products’ from the menus.

To stop Google tracking your searches (and your browsing activity if you use Chrome), head here, turn off the blue slider, then click Pause.

Your location history

Google keeps track of your movements in the real world, as well as the online one. It follows you when you’re signed into your Google account, and you’re carrying your phone or tablet at the same time.

You can view your location history by signing into your Timeline. Select a date from the drop-down menus in the top left corner.

To stop Google tracking your location click the Pause Location History button at the bottom of the page, then click Pause in the window that pops up. Keep in mind that this won’t turn off the built-in location-tracking abilities of any devices you use.

For example, if you use an Android phone, you may also wish to tap Settings, ‘Security & location’, then Location and either completely switch off ‘location tracking’, or tap ‘App-level permissions’ and disable it for individual apps.

Tick this box, then click ‘Delete Location History’ to permanently erase it

Disabling location tracking won’t delete any previous location activity that Google has recorded. To do this, click the small dustbin icon to the lower right of the Timeline page’s main map image. In the window that appears, tick the box next to ‘I understand and want to delete all Location History’, then click Delete Location History. This will permanently delete your location history – neither you nor Google will be able to get it back.

Bear in mind that disabling location tracking and deleting your location history may affect the functions of some Google services. For example, Google Now, which answers your spoken queries, will no longer be able to provide you with information or suggestions based on your location.

Your personal interests

Rather creepily, Google builds a list of things you like (and don’t like), based on your search and YouTube activity. It uses this to create a profile that lets advertisers target you. Google claims this is to “make the ads that you see more useful to you”.

Disable personalisation adverts by clicking the blue slider, then selecting Turn Off

To see what Google thinks your interests are, head here and sign in with your Google account. Scroll down to the ‘Topics you like’ and ‘Topics you don’t like’ headings. You may find these are eerily accurate. You can click the X to delete individual likes and dislikes, and add new ones (click ‘+New Topic’), should you wish.

Alternatively, you can completely turn off targeted advertising by clicking the blue slider to the right of the Ads Personalisation heading, then clicking Turn Off.

Your gender and birthday

Like many sites and services, Google asks for sensitive details – including your age and gender – when you sign up for an account. The difference is that Google may share some of this information openly, unless you tell it not to.

Head here and look under ‘Gender, date of birth and more’. If you see a green globe icon next to any of the information shown here, that means it’s shared publicly – anyone can see it when they look at your Google profile.

Select ‘Private’ to stop people seeing personal info on your Google profile

To change this, click the globe icon and select Private. Even then, Google will continue to use your gender information to “provide more relevant, tailored content you might be interested in, like ads” unless you change yet another setting.

Go to this page and scroll down to ‘Your profile’. Click the pencil icon next to Gender and select ‘Rather not say’. Be aware that choosing this will also stop Google tools and services from referring to you as either male or female.

Your voice

If you use the Google Now assistant, or any of the company’s Home smart speaker products, then recordings of your voice may also be among the data stored about you on Google’s giant servers.

Like most voice-controlled assistants, Google Now and Google Home work by learning and accessing all kinds of personal data, so you should avoid using them if you want to avoid Google’s tentacles. Deleting or blocking access to your data effectively renders them next to useless.

To check for and delete any existing voice recordings Google might have, head here and click in the Search box at the top. Make sure ‘All time’ is selected under ‘Filter by date’, then untick ‘All products’, tick ‘Voice & Audio’ and click the Search (magnifying glass) icon. Click the three dots button in the Search box, then click ‘Delete results’, Delete.

Your devices

Remove devices from Google’s history so it no longer knows what you use

As well as tracking you and your activities, Google likes to keep a record of the devices you’ve used to access its services – not just Android devices but Windows PCs, iPhones and more. It might be less invasive than some of the other data the company keeps on you, but you may still wish to delete devices you no longer use – if you’ve lost your phone and you want to block access to your Google account from it, for example.

To do so, sign in here, then click ‘Device activity & security events’ on the left. Now click Review Devices, click the device you want to delete and click the Remove button.

Image: Shutterstock

Acrylic Wi-Fi Home

What we liked

Acrylic Wi-Fi Home is the free version of a professional wireless network analysis tool, but it doesn’t feel like a cut-down program and offers pretty much all the features users would ever need. It provides real-time monitoring of surrounding Wi-Fi networks, is able to scan both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands, and supports the latest 802.11ac wireless standards, as well as older b/g/n ones.

It helps that the program has a very smart user interface that mimics the look and feel of Windows 10’s modern apps, even though it’s actually a standard program. You can switch between two different views by clicking the menu button and toggling Advanced Mode on or off. If you leave this setting disabled, the program shows a list of available networks at the top of the screen, with a real-time signal strength graph in the bottom right and a simple star-rating score for the network quality of each network you click on. Flip on Advance Mode, however, and the star ratings disappear in favour of additional tabs that let you view graphs displaying which networks are using which channels.

Acrylic Wi-Fi also lets you personalise its interface. For example, you can change the colours for colour-coded elements and select your own network refresh rate for the real-time monitoring. You can also set the program to launch in Advanced Mode by default, should you prefer. Click the menu, then select Configure for these options and more.

How it can be improved

One thing that slightly annoyed us about Acrylic Wi-Fi Home was the way it forced us to agree to anonymous usage reports on installation. Luckily, there’s a way to opt out of this once the program has been installed – click the menu button and select Configure, then choose your preferred options from the ‘Error reporting’ dropdowns. Assuming you don’t want to spend £30 to unlock the tool’s advanced features, you’ll also need to ignore the frequent encouragements to ‘Go Pro’.

Verdict

It might not have all the features of the Pro version, but Acrylic Wi-Fi Home is generous for a freebie. It’s also well laid out, customisable and very easy to use.

Features: 5
Performance: 5
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 5

Homedale

What we liked

Homedale’s big selling point is its simplicity. Information is presented via a clean, unfussy interface with six tabs running along the top of the window, including Adapter Overview (to see information about your device’s wireless adapter), Access Points (to view info about networks in range) and Frequency Usage (for a graphical representation of the channels nearby networks are occupying). Usefully, there’s a built-in Locate Me tool (under the Location tab), which uses Google Geolocation and Open WLAN Map Service data to pinpoint your whereabouts on a Google Map.

Homedale is a portable application – there’s nothing to install, you just unzip the download and run the .exe file whenever you want to use the program. This means that it won’t install any unwanted software on your PC. Plus, you can run it from an external drive, should you need to.

How it can be improved

It’s not necessarily Homedale’s fault, but Windows Defender SmartScreen falsely identifies the program as a potentially dangerous app. It’s definitely safe, though (we verified this at visrustotal.com), so just click ‘More info’, then ‘Run anyway’ in the warning message that opens when you attempt to run the tool for the first time.

Verdict

It might not be as pretty to look at as some of its rivals, but it presents lots of information in a straightforward way and offers some useful extra options, such as its location tool.

Features: 5
Performance: 5
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 5

WiScan

What we liked

WiScan scans both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (assuming your PC’s adapter supports both) and supplies signal strength, security and other information for all networks found. Tabs at the bottom of the program window let you switch between Beacons (a colour-coded list of all the access points available) and a useful map view of the 2.4GHz or 5GHz channels, which lets you easily see when several networks are crowded together on the same channel. Shortcuts at the top of the window screen provide quick ways to refresh your scan, set a timer interval, report your results and more. You can give access points aliases – ‘main router’, ‘upstairs homeplug’ and so on – for easy identification.

WiScan comes in two versions – a Windows installer and a zip file containing a portable version.

How it can be improved

Like Homedale, the portable version of WiScan may be falsely accused of being malware by Windows Defender, which could put people off – it’s safe to use, though. Unlike Homedale, however, WiScan prefers to present its information in a somewhat garish, amateurish-looking interface. There are a few archaic language choices – ‘beacons’ instead of access points and BSSID instead of MAC address – which can be a little confusing.

Verdict

Extra features are few and far between and some of the interface’s design elements feel a bit clunky, but WiScan is a very easy-to-use free tool for analysing nearby networks.

Features: 4
Performance: 4
Ease of use: 4
Overall: 4

Best of the rest

WifiInfoView

For a basic analysis of the wireless networks around you, this tool (from the ever-dependable NirSoft) may well be all you need. It scans the local area and presents lots of information about the networks it finds, including for SSID, Mac address, network type, channel number and much more. It lacks graphical views and real-time monitoring of some Wi-Fi tools, but includes useful info, such as router make and model.

WiFi Commander

WiFi Commander is notable partly because it’s a Windows Store app, rather than a standard program. But it also caught our attention thanks to its rather cool 3D grid view of nearby networks, which makes it easy to see which channels are the busiest. The downside is that it costs £3.29, but there’s a free trial you can download to see if it’s worth coughing up cash for.

Ekahau Heatmapper

This tool requires a bit of legwork and works best if you have a floorplan of your home. Wander around, clicking your current location on the floorplan to create a ‘heatmap’ showing where your network’s wireless signal is strongest (and weakest). Though free, you have to sign up for emails before you can download it (you can opt out later). Ekahau Heatmapper is very useful but, sadly, it hasn’t been updated in quite a while.