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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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