what's actually the difference between yahoo mail and windows mail?

Question

what's actually the difference between e-mail programs such as windows mail/outlook express/mozilla thunderbird with those like gmail/yahoo mail? what i understand is gmail/yahoo mail need to run on an internet browser while windows mail/outlook express/mozilla thunderbird are standalone programs installed in your pc. once i tried to save my mail from yahoo mail into my thumbdrive so that i can read it offline but i dunno how to do it. then my friend suggest me to use windows mail since that's the only way possible of doing it but he too never done it before. if gmail/yahoo mail can be accessed on any machine online,then what's with all the hypes when windows mail was launched back then but none of my friends use it???

Answer 1

Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc all use proprietary web-based protocols. However, with Mozilla Thunderbird, which is a standalone e-mail program, you can access these accounts and have them saved directly to your computer, so you can store them for later. Thunderbird uses plug-ins that allow the protocols to be used in the program.

Outlook itself is a standalone program, but proprietary only for Hotmail, as far as I know. I don't use it anymore, so I'm not sure if they've changed that. As for Windows Mail, I'm not sure about that one.