Left Windows and trying to learn Fedora 18

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Congrats for finding the courage to leave Windows.

Thunderbird is a popular email client, like @sideburns mentioned. I use it for both my Comcast and MSN/Live accounts. It can be customized with add-ins, just like Firefox can.

Here are some links that might help:
Linux Basics
Fedora Linux Essentials
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ
http://www.fedorafaq.org/
http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/linux/fedora
http://fedoralinuxtipsandtricks.blogspot.com/

You might want to install bleachbit, from the standard repos. To do so, do this, as root:

yum install bleachbit

This is very similar to ccleaner, but will only tidy up the files and folders you own. The first time you run it, it will give you the option to download and install bleachbit for Administrator. Take it. This will ask for the root password when you run it, but will allow you to clean up system files and folders. Between the two, you can get rid of an astonishing amount of cruft. Don't bother, however, looking around for a defrag utility because Linux almost never needs it, and once you use one, you find yourself needing it more and more often. In the unlikely event that you do need to defrag, a complete backup, reformat and restore actually does a better job.