Chapter 17. Using Webmail Services

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Learning about Webmail services

  • Discovering the features of Webmail

  • Learning about syndication services

  • Subscribing to syndicated content

This chapter describes two of the most popular Web services that are deployed in the cloud: Webmail and syndicated content. Webmail sites are among the most popular Web sites in use today with the major services having hundreds of millions of user accounts.

Many Webmail services are free, and the rest are generally modestly priced. Webmail may be differentiated from hosted e-mail by its access through a Web browser. This makes them platform-independent. These services also sometimes use POP3 and IMAP, which allows them to be used to feed e-mail into traditional e-mail clients like Outlook and Thunderbird.

The current generation of Webmail services implements user interfaces based on Ajax and tends to follow a model that makes them look similar to the Microsoft Outlook e-mail client. These browser-based services provide filters, advanced search capabilities, sorting, tagging, and many other features. Most of these services use spam and virus detection to eliminate unwanted mail.

Syndication services are a method for publishing content from Web sites, blogs, wikis, and other services. It is a form of group e-mail, broadcast e-mail if you will.

There are both content providers and content consumers. Examples of content providers include not only the services just mentioned but also aggregation services and ...

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