Marketing is the way your people answer the phone. - Seth Godin

Effective communication – in email, web writing, phone conversations, face-to-face meetings – is one of the underpinnings of good business practice. While you might assume that good communication skills are intuitive, not everyone presents their ideas in the same way.

If you are someone who has migrated from Microsoft Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird, you may have noticed that one of the apparent missing features is a calendar. A built-in calendar application with an email client is quite useful for those who work collaboratively online or within a small office as it makes events easier to schedule.

With the dominance of webmail for the past ten years, email client software has almost been forgotten. It seems these days very few people know the difference between email and the web, as they learned how to use the Internet long after the email client fell from popularity.

So, what is an email client?

One of the greatest money-sinks for a small business can be software.  Today you can buy a new computer for much less than you could ten years ago, but often the software becomes the unexpected extra cost. After getting an office suite, photo editor, and anti-virus you may find that these three programs alone cost just as much as your computer!