Email Basics

Electronic mail (e-mail) gives you a fast, cheap way to send information all over the world and to receive information through your very own e-mail mailbox, or "inbox." It can take the place of telephone calls, faxes, courier shipments, and traditional letter mail. Use it to keep in touch with friends, family, and business contacts. More than 80 million people worldwide already do. Here's how.

Basics of sending and receiving
To send and receive electronic-mail messages, or e-mail, over the Internet, and to organize your messages, you need an e-mail account. You can get this through an Internet service provider or online service provider. You also need an e-mail client—e-mail software for your computer. Your e-mail client creates an Inbox on your computer. When you check your e-mail, new messages are downloaded into your Inbox.

Pick an e-mail client
Here are some examples of e-mail clients:

Microsoft® Outlook™— a messaging and collaboration client; provides advanced e-mail, calendar, and contact management and a platform for workgroup information sharing when used with Microsoft Exchange Server.

Hotmail— the world's leading provider of free e-mail (it's supported by advertising). Because it is Web-based, everything you need to use Hotmail resides on the Internet, rather than your computer. So you can use Hotmail on any computer that has access to the Internet. If you travel, move, or change your Internet service provider, your Hotmail e-mail address and service stay the same.

Microsoft Outlook Express— designed for users who need fast, reliable e-mail and newsgroup functionality without the full capabilities of Outlook. Outlook Express is included in the Microsoft Windows® operating system and is especially easy to use if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer version Web browser.

Microsoft Exchange— automatically included in the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system

Terminology
There are many acronyms associated with e-mail. Here are some that you may come across:

SMTP— Simple Mail Transport Protocol, the standard rules that many e-mail clients use to handle outgoing e-mail messages.

POP3— Post Office Protocol, the standard rules that many e-mail clients use to handle incoming e-mail messages.

E-mail clients built on standards like SMTP and POP3 can share information with each other, so we don't all need to use the same e-mail client. To set up your e-mail client, you may need to know your SMTP server address and your POP3 server address. If so, your Internet service provider (ISP) can give you this information. Combase's settings can be found here. Some e-mail clients use programs called wizards to help you get set up.

MIME— Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a format for turning an e-mail attachment, such as a Microsoft Word file, into ASCII text so it can be sent from one e-mail account to another.

 
Anatomy of an e-mail address
To send a message to someone, you must type his or her e-mail address in the "To" section of your e-mail message. Generally, there are two parts to an e-mail address: Your logon identity and the identity of your ISP. These are separated by the symbol @. A typical e-mail address for someone who uses ComBase, for example, looks like this: username@combase.com

The extension—.com—indicates that ComBase is a commercial establishment. Other common extensions are .gov (for government users) and .edu (for educational users). E-mail addresses outside of the United States may also include letters that indicate the country of the user's ISP.

What about attachments?
You can send more than simple text in your electronic-mail messages. You can also attach computer documents—including word-processor, spreadsheet, graphic, and video files—to an e-mail message. So e-mail is a useful way to share files that more than one person wants or needs.

With Microsoft® Outlook™, e-mail gets even more sophisticated. Outlook allows you to send messages on HTML "stationery," which contains background graphics and special, pre-selected font designs and colors to match.

Special notes

• The person who receives your e-mail with an attachment can open the attachment if he or she has the program in which the attachment was created.
• If the recipient does not have the program you used to create your attachment, he or she may be able to get the appropriate viewer, such as Microsoft® Word viewer or Microsoft PowerPoint® viewer. A viewer contains the components of a program needed to display a file created with the full version of the program.

To send an attachment, your e-mail client converts the attachment's digital code into ASCII text, using a format such as uuencode or MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). In order for the recipient to read the attachment, the recipient's e-mail client must be able to decode this format, or he or she must have another program that can decode it.

Using Newsgroups
If your e-mail client is also a newsreader, you can use it to subscribe to, read messages from, and post messages to newsgroups, online discussions on practically any topic. Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 4.0 makes newsgroup access easy, too. On the Go menu, simply select News. Internet Explorer automatically launches Outlook Express and opens your newsgroups folder so you can get down to business.

Here are some newsgroup basics:

• Each newsgroup covers a particular topic, often alluded to in its name.
• A newsgroup is really a discussion string comprised of a series of related messages. Each message responds to an earlier message or addresses the overall newsgroup topic in some way. You can post your own message in response to the messages that interest you most.
• You can find newsgroups that may interest you by searching for them through the Deja News Web site.
• Together, newsgroups make up Usenet, which you can think of as part of the Internet.

Before you join in:

• Read a newsgroup's FAQ, or frequently asked questions, file first to learn more about the group. (Almost all newsgroups have a FAQ.)
• Check whether the newsgroup has a file containing its charter and rules. If it does, read this before you post messages.

Read a good portion of a discussion string before joining in. Others in the discussion will appreciate that you took the time to get familiar with the conversation first.

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