Email is one of the most used communication medium on web and to communicate through that, we install either desktop clients or use web browsers. Now a days web browsers are so capable that you can avoid having separate software installations on your local computer. For example, you can use online Photoshop tool for minimal customization rather than installing bulky and pricy software. One of the benefit of having a desktop email client is that you can receive and check inboxes of multiple email accounts at a time. What if you can get the same on your normal web browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox?
Almost all the recent browsers are having tabs rather than a default new window to open a new page. Whenever you start a browser and open couple of tabs in that, those tabs come under a session inside the browser. With the help of extensions or add-ons, you can actually save those sessions and open them as per your choice. For example, if I have opened few websites related to breaking news like CNN, BBC, NY Times, Bloomberg on Google Chrome then save that session of Chrome with the name as ‘Breaking News’. Tomorrow morning, I don’t need to open those four websites again as I can open them all at once with the saved session.
To use the web browser as a desktop email client, you can save the session of all opened email pages say Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Custom URL Email client etc. and can save the session. While login for the first time before saving the session, don’t forget to check the box saying ‘keep me logged in’. Gmail is also having ‘Multiple Sign-in’ feature which will let you open multiple Gmail accounts inside the same browser.
Google Chrome users need to install any of these extensions to save the session of opened tabs: Session Manager, Session Buddy, TabCloud, FreshStart. Mozilla Firefox users need to install Session Manager or Save Session add-on to do that.
I know this would not exactly make the desktop email clients redundant but would save your time and resources by opening multiple email accounts at a time. You can use these session managers in organizing your daily visiting sites as well.