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Excessive Internet Data Usage


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I just haven't wrapped my brain around Office requiring an internet connection unless you are collaborating in real time with other users. This is also why I don't use a mail client like Outlook. I prefer portable email like gmail. I don't use cloud storage so peering eyes can't see my intellectual property (I write songs) and keep everything on a hard drive with thumb drive backups. Old school for me. Keeps us posted though because I am interested on knowing where that data bleed is coming from.

 

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I also do not use Cloud storage.  When I got my new computer in 2016, I uninstalled OneDrive and everything else that was connected to the Cloud.  For one thing, I do not trust the Cloud, and second, I do not want someone else storing my files.  I back everything up using a couple of external hard drives and store one at my son's house.  Backing all that stuff up to the Cloud takes online gigabytes, so you might want to uninstall it or even delete the software. 

Computer manufacturers, especially Dell, put a whole bunch of garbage on a new computer because they get paid for links to places like Amazon.  Drives me nuts that i should have to get rid of all the advertising garbage!!!  Deleting all of those things helps because some of them love to connect you and send you popup ads.  And, I also turn off the automatic functions that cause videos to play on their own, but I think I have only been able to do this on some sites. 

I have the university version of Office 365 on my backup computer and I can't remember what adjustments I made, but I don't think anything goes to online storage.  Need to check on this before I use it for more than a backup.

I have two jetpacks and a cell phone through Verizon, so now have 30 gigs per month that are not slowed down on the jetpacks and can tether my phone if I really get desperate for another 15 gigs.  (I have to have a backup jetpack because I work online, but that gives me adequate monthly usage.) 

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Just did some research.  You can still buy Office 2016 for Home and Business for $229.  They would really, really prefer that you buy Office 365 because that's all they advertise.  This removes the possibility of Cloud storage and automatic downloads.   https://products.office.com/en-US/buy/compare-microsoft-office-products?tab=1

There is a student and home version for $149 which does not include Outlook, but I am not sure who qualifies. 

 By the way, going a Google search on "I hate Office 365" gives you some interesting complaints.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 8/2/2017 at 12:06 PM, dsimpson said:

  We went to the local Verizon store and increased our limit to 24 GB and even that was not enough last month.

Don't have to visit a store to do that.  I have the XXL (24g) plan same as you, with monthly carryovers and "bonus" data.  My usage was around 12 gig last month, with a LOT of FB visits and surfing.  I don't  have a clue why you're using so much.

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13 hours ago, hemsteadc said:

Don't have to visit a store to do that.  I have the XXL (24g) plan same as you, with monthly carryovers and "bonus" data.  My usage was around 12 gig last month, with a LOT of FB visits and surfing.  I don't  have a clue why you're using so much.

Do you stream much to watch TV?

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35 minutes ago, Biker56 said:

OpenOffice is FREE and will do anything $$ MS office does.

X2, except I prefer the free LibreOffice fork from The Document Foundation. LibreOffice updates more frequently with new features and bug fixes, and due to licensing differences, Libre can incorporate new features the Apache OpenOffice folks come up with, but Open cannot use new Libre features. Both are step children of the old IBM Lotus Symphony, and either one is a better choice than MS Office in my opinion...

Dutch
2001 GBM Landau 34' Class A
F-53 Chassis, Triton V10, TST TPMS
2011 Toyota RAV4 4WD/Remco pump
ReadyBrute Elite tow bar/brake system

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Neither LibreOffice or OpenOffice has an email/calendar client included, so no replacement for MS Outlook. Since Outlook is the one that uses all the data, there is no reason to replace MS Office with one of those to reduce data usage.  If you have to buy an office suite, go ahead and try LibreOffice first.  It will probably work for your needs.   But don't expect to use less internet data.

2004 40' Newmar Dutch Star DP towing an AWD 2020 Ford Escape Hybrid, Fulltimer July 2003 to October 2018, Parttimer now.
Travels through much of 2013 - http://www.sacnoth.com - Bill, Diane and Evita (the cat)
 

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Bill, the Document Foundation folks have been discussing a full PIM integration with the folks at Mozilla Thunderbird, but I don't know the current status in that direction.

Dutch
2001 GBM Landau 34' Class A
F-53 Chassis, Triton V10, TST TPMS
2011 Toyota RAV4 4WD/Remco pump
ReadyBrute Elite tow bar/brake system

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I am just curious as to why so many people want to use a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you are nomads, you don't have an ISP anyway. What is not sufficient in the webmail interface of gmail or mail.com or whatever mail system you use? I used to use Outlook, but I see no benefit to it because I can do the exact same things in the gmail web interface. And I don't have to mess with setting up server names like in a client program.

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53 minutes ago, eddie1261 said:

I am just curious as to why so many people want to use a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you are nomads, you don't have an ISP anyway. What is not sufficient in the webmail interface of gmail or mail.com or whatever mail system you use? I used to use Outlook, but I see no benefit to it because I can do the exact same things in the gmail web interface. And I don't have to mess with setting up server names like in a client program.

Macros, selective mail folders based upon sender/content, synchronization with other systems, just a few of the features that Outlook has that are not present in webmail applications.  Plus I have utilities that I have added to Outlook.  To each their own.

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29 minutes ago, Mark and Dale Bruss said:

Macros, selective mail folders based upon sender/content, synchronization with other systems, just a few of the features that Outlook has that are not present in webmail applications.  Plus I have utilities that I have added to Outlook.  To each their own.

Now you have the nerd interested. Utilities you have added to Outlook? Can you elaborate? Interested in learning about that. As far as folders, my gmail sends everything to one of 17 folders I have set up using filters. If it's from "Betty" it goes to the Betty folder. Also a beautiful filter that sends all the spam directly to the trash. Love it. How is Outlooks spam filter? I haven't used Outlook in over a decade and back then it was okay but just okay. I have Office on 2 of my computers but only for Word and Excel. Outlook is installed but not configured.

I'm really interested in macros. I have a few in my Excel financial sheets. They have been there forever and I would hate to have to write new ones. I have long since forgotten the inner workings of Excel and Word. Since I stopped having to support them, I stopped working with Office in that kind of depth. What kind of macros are there in Outlook? The place I was email administrator used Novell's GroupWise until just as I was leaving when they were switching over to become an all Microsoft house.

 

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4 hours ago, eddie1261 said:

I am just curious as to why so many people want to use a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you are nomads, you don't have an ISP anyway. What is not sufficient in the webmail interface of gmail or mail.com or whatever mail system you use? I used to use Outlook, but I see no benefit to it because I can do the exact same things in the gmail web interface. And I don't have to mess with setting up server names like in a client program.

And if you have emails you have not read, and then moved to a location where you don't have cell coverage, you can read your emails?

Also I have 4 active emails which automatically download to Thunderbird w/o my doing anything but opening up my laptop and connecting to the internet.  Thunderbird also moves incoming emails to certain folders based on parameters I set up.  These are emails of a certain topic or from a certain source all get put in their respective folder.  Additionally I can set up to automatically forward or delete emails.   

Can your method do all of this and in a single window as well.

Al & Sharon
2006 Winnebago Journey 36G 
2020 Chevy Colorado Toad
San Antonio, TX

http://downtheroadaroundthebend.blogspot.com/

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1 minute ago, Al F said:

And if you have emails you have not read, and then moved to a location where you don't have cell coverage, you can read your emails?

Also I have 4 active emails which automatically download to Thunderbird w/o my doing anything but opening up my laptop and connecting to the internet.  Thunderbird also moves incoming emails to certain folders based on parameters I set up.  These are emails of a certain topic or from a certain source all get put in their respective folder.  Additionally I can set up to automatically forward or delete emails.   

Can your method do all of this and in a single window as well.

Not following the first part. If I am in a place where I have no internet connection, I will also not know I have email. I'll read them when I read them because in my situation, nothing is even modestly important enough to race to a computer and deal with it immediately. I know people who keep every email they have every gotten, which I don't do. Read it, delete it. I'll never have to prove you said something. My storage in all my subfolders is not 30 emails in total because again, read it, delete it. And most of those are proofs of purchase and such. My people know to text me rather than email or call. I don't even answer stuff like "Hey! How you doing?" See, when you have no life, nothing ever happens. Again, my situation. The other email accounts I have all forward to my gmail.

My email is bill pay notices, which I keep until I pay the bill and then delete, people wanting to sell me life insurance, car insurance, home security systems, medicare scammers.... all the old guy email. Once I move from my house, and those mortgage and utility bills are gone, my email will (thankfully) drop to almost non existent, a welcome change after working in IT for years with folders for each of 3 dozen ongoing projects filled with mail from people who don't know to strip out the last 73 replies before adding their 2 cents... LOL! I don't work now so I have no official mail.  I literally had 250 emails somewhat legitimate every day, not counting automated crap every time a system was rebooted or a database was nearing user capacity. All those ridiculous daily reports that I never looked at, but they were sent to IT-All and I was in that group. Many were sent to IT-All and IT-Help Desk, so I got to see them TWICE! Altogether, I had close to 1000 a day, most deleted without reading.

As far as "where I have no cell service", I likely won't be in that situation much if ever. I will drive until I find either cell or wifi I can hook onto. I won't stop where I can't get internet.

So yeah, I know Thunderbird is a well featured mail client. I used it when I worked at an Internet provider and had to know all the mail clients to support customers. I don't know what you meant by "in a single window" in this context. My folder list is down the left side like a client program, and I can go to whichever folder, just like Outlook, T-Bird and Eudora.

Remember that this thread started by someone relating huge internet usage using Office 365. That was when I asked if they were connecting to a corporate mail server for work or if a web based email would do the same job and only poll on demand rather than at a selected interval to cut down on the internet dependency. I moved to portable mail years ago mainly so my email would never change again. I had a span where due to moving for jobs my email address changed 3 times in 2 years. From Road Runner, to GWIS, and back to Road Runner. That required me contacting about 35 businesses so they could change my record and a couple of hundred personal contacts. That sent me running into the arms of web based (portable) mail. And my only question about using a client vs the web interface is how much different it is. For me I see no advantage to run a client here that just accesses the interface there. Also, utopia for me would be if I didn't get email EVER, but I also don't stand by the mailbox waiting for the mailman. But a lot of the RVers are still working, most have kids they want to be in touch with, etc... That's just not my situation. I am not throwing shade on Thunderbird or promoting gmail. Just asking questions.

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6 hours ago, eddie1261 said:

Not following the first part. If I am in a place where I have no internet connection, I will also not know I have email. I'll read them when I read them because in my situation, nothing is even modestly important enough to race to a computer and deal with it immediately. I know people who keep every email they have every gotten, which I don't do. Read it, delete it. I'll never have to prove you said something. My storage in all my subfolders is not 30 emails in total because again, read it, delete it. And most of those are proofs of purchase and such. My people know to text me rather than email or call. I don't even answer stuff like "Hey! How you doing?" See, when you have no life, nothing ever happens. Again, my situation. The other email accounts I have all forward to my gmail.

My email is bill pay notices, which I keep until I pay the bill and then delete, people wanting to sell me life insurance, car insurance, home security systems, medicare scammers.... all the old guy email. Once I move from my house, and those mortgage and utility bills are gone, my email will (thankfully) drop to almost non existent, a welcome change after working in IT for years with folders for each of 3 dozen ongoing projects filled with mail from people who don't know to strip out the last 73 replies before adding their 2 cents... LOL! I don't work now so I have no official mail.  I literally had 250 emails somewhat legitimate every day, not counting automated crap every time a system was rebooted or a database was nearing user capacity. All those ridiculous daily reports that I never looked at, but they were sent to IT-All and I was in that group. Many were sent to IT-All and IT-Help Desk, so I got to see them TWICE! Altogether, I had close to 1000 a day, most deleted without reading.

As far as "where I have no cell service", I likely won't be in that situation much if ever. I will drive until I find either cell or wifi I can hook onto. I won't stop where I can't get internet.

So yeah, I know Thunderbird is a well featured mail client. I used it when I worked at an Internet provider and had to know all the mail clients to support customers. I don't know what you meant by "in a single window" in this context. My folder list is down the left side like a client program, and I can go to whichever folder, just like Outlook, T-Bird and Eudora.

Remember that this thread started by someone relating huge internet usage using Office 365. That was when I asked if they were connecting to a corporate mail server for work or if a web based email would do the same job and only poll on demand rather than at a selected interval to cut down on the internet dependency. I moved to portable mail years ago mainly so my email would never change again. I had a span where due to moving for jobs my email address changed 3 times in 2 years. From Road Runner, to GWIS, and back to Road Runner. That required me contacting about 35 businesses so they could change my record and a couple of hundred personal contacts. That sent me running into the arms of web based (portable) mail. And my only question about using a client vs the web interface is how much different it is. For me I see no advantage to run a client here that just accesses the interface there. Also, utopia for me would be if I didn't get email EVER, but I also don't stand by the mailbox waiting for the mailman. But a lot of the RVers are still working, most have kids they want to be in touch with, etc... That's just not my situation. I am not throwing shade on Thunderbird or promoting gmail. Just asking questions.

I infer from your reply you don't get emails from this forum when there is a reply to a topic you started or replied to.  Or if you do you open it immediately, read it, take what ever action you deem necessary and then delete it.  I guess you don't save emails from financial institutions, or when you order things online.  You just read and delete.  

Different folks do different things.  I receive lots of email from different sources, most dealing with RV'ing and other social activities (I look at these forums as a social activity, not business).  I don't have the time to open and take some action, including deleting, as soon as the email comes in. 

As long as the way you deal with emails works for you that is great. 

I was attempting to respond to your reply:

Quote

I am just curious as to why so many people want to use a mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you are nomads, you don't have an ISP anyway. What is not sufficient in the webmail interface of gmail or mail.com or whatever mail system you use? I used to use Outlook, but I see no benefit to it because I can do the exact same things in the gmail web interface. And I don't have to mess with setting up server names like in a client program.

as to why some of us want an application like Thunderbird.  You don't see a need for the apps so that seems to work fine for you.  That's great.

Al & Sharon
2006 Winnebago Journey 36G 
2020 Chevy Colorado Toad
San Antonio, TX

http://downtheroadaroundthebend.blogspot.com/

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Yes Al, You are correct. I don't keep things. I act immediately and then have no need to save email beyond the time frame that it takes for resolution.  So again yes, web mail interfaces work for me, because I can keep things there until they are moot, which is what I do now.

Email addresses outside my main email (I have 2 others) are also web based, so the same concept applies. Those burner email accounts I only use when something demands an email to allow access to a site and also demand that you reply to an email verifying the address. After that point they can email me all they like and i will never read it. If it's a place that wants to send me ads and such, I just unsub from it on the first one.

But as always, different people, different preferences. My only point for even getting into this discussion was that downloading email to your computer uses far more bandwidth than reading it on the  web, and that was the topic. Excessive data usage. Being on the web for 10 minutes uses far less data than moving a giga byte of mail.

I'll bow out of this one now.

 

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Well, Eddie got my curiosity up, so I repeated a series of test I did at least 10 years ago to see if the results have changed much. I sent a 1,000 word plain text email message to both my Gmail account and my primary hosted email account that I read with Thunderbird via IMAP. I then measured the data used to open each one, with my Firefox browser open but not on the Gmail site, and Thunderbird closed. I used Networx as the measuring tool. Each test was repeated 10 times. There was only a few kb difference between the 10 Gmail tests, and about the same between the 10 Thunderbird tests. The results showed that it took ~1MB to open the Gmail webmail page and message, but only ~0.5MB to open Thunderbird and the message. That's pretty consistent with my results from 10 years ago as I recall. Thinking about it, it makes sense since every time you read an email on the Gmail webmail page, you're downloading the entire page for display, while Thunderbird's "page" already exists locally, so only the message itself uses online data. I did a few more tests comparing reading the message via webmail versus downloading the same message from Gmail to Thunderbird, and there was no significant difference from the first results. The local client read email consistently used about half the data the webmail UI used. Using IMAP, the full message is not downloaded until you open it, so unwanted mail can easily be deleted on the server with virtually no additional data used. Using POP instead of IMAP on the other hand, would have the same results for opened mail, but unwanted mail would be fully downloaded, using more data than deleting it on a webmail page. The differences in that case, become even more drastic if the unwanted mail has attachments. IMAP also lends itself well to synchronizing mail between multiple devices. The bottom line is that for most email, a local client uses less data than a webmail UI, since there's less data to download.

Dutch
2001 GBM Landau 34' Class A
F-53 Chassis, Triton V10, TST TPMS
2011 Toyota RAV4 4WD/Remco pump
ReadyBrute Elite tow bar/brake system

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Dutch,

Great test.  Glad you did the testing. 

You mentioned Networx, which I also use.  I just used Networx to check the amount of data used by Thunderbird and Firefox over the last 30 days. 

Thunderbird--  137M

Firefox   5.6G

My web browsing (Firefox) used 40 times as much as Thunderbird and I don't watch videos longer than a few seconds to less than couple minutes.

For the last full year the ratio is about the same.

Al & Sharon
2006 Winnebago Journey 36G 
2020 Chevy Colorado Toad
San Antonio, TX

http://downtheroadaroundthebend.blogspot.com/

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2 minutes ago, Al F said:

Dutch,

Great test.  Glad you did the testing. 

You mentioned Networx, which I also use.  I just used Networx to check the amount of data used by Thunderbird and Firefox over the last 30 days. 

Thunderbird--  137M

Firefox   5.6G

My web browsing (Firefox) used 40 times as much as Thunderbird and I don't watch videos longer than a few seconds to less than couple minutes.

For the last full year the ratio is about the same.

I repeated the test set again, Al, except this time I used my own web hosting service's webmail UI instead Gmail. The results were pretty much the same, with the hosted webmail using slightly less data than Gmail did, but it also has a plainer UI than Gmail, so that's consistent anyway. The difference of course, between the webmail and local client is the supporting webpage data that has to download to your computer to display the email, where the local client display data already exists on your computer.

And yep, Networx is a very "cool tool"! ;)

Dutch
2001 GBM Landau 34' Class A
F-53 Chassis, Triton V10, TST TPMS
2011 Toyota RAV4 4WD/Remco pump
ReadyBrute Elite tow bar/brake system

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Dutch & Al,  Thanks for the very good information.  Those data consumption issues with email never occurred to me.  We use "mail" on a Mac to get our Gmail and Yahoo Mail - mostly because we just like to have the message traffic consolidated in one place but this is another very good reason to use a client.

---Ron

Ron Engelsman

http://www.mytripjournal.com/our_odyssey

Full-Timing since mid 2007

23' Komfort TT

2004 Chevy Avalanche 4x4 8.1L

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Hi - I'm replying to the orig. post.  I read the thread and got bogged down, some of the tech issues being beyond my understanding or need, but I did want to say, in case someone hasn't :  We changed from the Verizon jetpack at 3G to Verizon 4G w/ 3 separate phone lines.   Each one was given 10 GB and recently upgraded by Verizon for free to 15 GB because they are now automatically throttling us down.  So, we have 45 GB total; yes, each one has 15 and will be throttled individually at the 15+ limit, but we just rotate our phones for the hotspot.  As a side note, because we purchased two cheap phones from Verizon, they threw in the third for free.  So far it is working out, but I will be scrutinizing all the great usage tips in this thread, thank you.  Hope this helps someone.

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