For a windows 7 netbook?
I need to be able to download mails onto the netbook and answer on a 10 hour train journey which has no wifi and won’t always have mobile signal.
Once I get back to wifi I want to be able to send all replies.
What’s best?

Whatever Internet Mail and News is called this week. Live Mail? Part of Windows Essentials.

There’s almost certainly better but there’s fewer that are simpler, and for what you need it’ll be ideal.

Here you go.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-live/essentials

Note that it’s a suite with Messenger and a bunch of other pish. Just be careful to untick everything you don’t want, which is probably most of it. (Might have to choose a custom install to do that, I don’t remember now.)

Cheers

https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/
though I may be showing my irrational bias against MS software there

The Live mail thingy is not too bad really. Windows 8, if you’re using touch, the built in Mail app is actually quite reasonable for basic on the go mail, and can access Exchange accounts.

Something more powerful, then Thunderbird. Though it lacks a lot compared to Outlook, mostly in the contacts and calendar department (and I think the calendar project plugin thing has been scrapped?).

Should all be able to do offline mail and send on connection.

Also, not sure but does GMail work as an offline app within Chrome (given it must work on Chromebooks)? Never tried, and obviously it’s tied to GMail mainly.