Why E-mail?
E-mail is cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call, less of a hassle than a fax. Using e-mail, differences in location and time zone are less of an obstacle to communication. There is also evidence that e-mail leads to a more harmonious and egalitarian information exchange.
What makes e-mail different? Electronic communication, because of its speed and multiple broadcasting ability, is fundamentally different from paper-based communication. As the turnaround time can be so fast, e-mail is more interactive or conversational than traditional paper-based unidirectional communication.
Due to these advantages, e-mail usage is exploding worldwide. As of now, 30% of adults in the United States and Canada have got a minimum one e-mail address.
Watch out! If you do not have an e-mail address by the year 2000, you may not be a relevant part of this planet.
Electronic mail isn't much different
than a letter on paper; it just gets delivered faster. Rather much faster
than you can imagine!
Just like with the post office, knowing
the correct address is crucial while sending e-mail.
Attaching files: You can attach documents,
pictures and even sound and video files to your e-mail messages.
Mailing Lists: Mailing lists are a
great way to communicate with people around the world. It saves you time and
money while searching in address books.
It can take days to send a letter across a country and weeks to go around the world. To save time and money, more and more people are using electronic mail. It's fast, easy and much cheaper than the traditional letters through post office. So what is e-mail? In its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from one computer to another. You can send or receive personal and business-related messages with attachments, such as pictures or formatted documents. You can even send voice messages called as Voice-mails.
Just as a letter makes stops at different postal stations along its way, e-mail passes from one computer to another as it travels along the network. Each computer reads the e-mail address, then routes it to another computer until it eventually reaches its destination. It's then stored in an electronic mailbox. With the Internet, this whole process usually takes just a few minutes, allowing you to quickly and easily communicate with millions of people around the world anytime of the day or night, for the cost of a local phone call.
Let's say you have a small business with sales representatives working around the country. How do you keep in touch without spending a fortune? Internet e-mail is the best way to go. The Internet allows you to communicate in a way that earlier used to be possible only for huge corporations. It is no wonder e-mail has become one of the most popular uses of the Internet.
You can send e-mail to anyone who has an e-mail address, anywhere in the world. Remember that almost all Internet service providers (ISPs) and all major online services offer an e-mail address with every account.
Until recently, e-mail on the Internet was good only for short notes. You couldn't send attachments like formatted documents or graphics. With the advent of MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension, and other types of encoding schemes, such as UUencode, not only can you send messages electronically, but you can also send formatted documents, photos, sound files, and video files. Just make sure that the person to whom you send the attachment has the software capable of decoding it.
The beauty of e-mail is that even if you have limited access to the Internet, you can still take advantage of the many services available (ftp, archie, mailing lists, etc.) if you have an e-mail account.
Here, are some tips for good e-mail style: provide your audience with adequate context, use meaningful subject lines, quote the e-mail to which you are responding, avoid pronouns, be aware of page layout issues, stick with Short paragraphs.
E-mail messages are similar
to letters, with two main parts.
The header contains your name and address, the name and address of the person of the recipient, the name and address of anyone who is being copied, the date of the message and what the message is about. The body contains the text of the message. Just like with letters, you need the correct address. If you use the wrong address or mistype it, your message will get bounced back to you --the old Return to Sender, Address Unknown routine.
When you receive an e-mail, the header tells you where it came from, how it was sent, and when. It's sort of like an electronic postmark. Most e-mail programs these days let you insert what's known as a signature at the bottom of the message. This can be anything from a clever quote to some additional information about you, such as your title, company name, and phone number. If you're creative, you can create an animal or design using just the characters on your keyboard and include it in your signature.
Unlike
a letter, which is typically sealed in an envelope, e-mail is not as private.
Think of e-mail as you would a post card. Messages can be intercepted and read
by people who really shouldn't be looking at it. Avoid including any confidential
information unless you have found a way to encrypt it prior to sending
it.
Here's a question for you: how do you go about finding someone's e-mail address?
Unfortunately, there is no reliable directory assistance for the Internet -- at least not yet. But by understanding how e-mail addresses work, there are ways to figure it out. Believe it or not, guessing is frequently used, and it sometimes works. But before you try this on your own, let's take a quick look at the anatomy of an e-mail address.
Internet e-mail addresses typically have two main parts:
aryans@mykanpur.com
First there is the user name (aryans) which refers to the recipient's mailbox. Then there's an axon sign (@). Next comes the host name (mykanpur), which is also called the domain name. This refers to the mail server, the computer where the recipient has an electronic mailbox. It's usually the name of a company or organization. Finally, there's a [DOT] followed by three letters (com) that indicate the type of domain.
An address ending with .com means the host is a business or commercial enterprise or a commercial online service like America Online. Most companies use this extension. A host name ending with .edu means the host is a university or educational facility, while a .org indicates the host is a non-commercial organization. Let's say you want to e-mail the President of the United States. You would send mail to Mr. Bill Clinton at e-mail address president@whitehouse.gov. gov stands for government and is used by government agencies and officials. Other extensions you might encounter are .mil for military and .net for network. The latter tends to be reserved for organizations like Internet service providers. By the way, there are currently plans to add seven additional top level domains, such as .web, later this year. For e-mail addresses outside of the United States, there is often a (.) followed by two letters representing the country. For instance, .in indicates India, .ca indicates Canada, .de indicates Germany and .nz indicates New Zealand etc.
So how do you find someone's e-mail address? If you know where they work, you can guess the domain name. But what about the recipient's mailbox? At most organizations, people now have their own e-mail box. The recipient's name may be just their last name, their first initial and last name, or their first and last name separated by a dot or an underscore. Again, you have to just take a guess. Of course there can also be other combinations of letters or even numbers so guessing won't always work.
Although there is no comprehensive directory of e-mail or Internet addresses, you can consult several online resources:
http://www.four11.com - a free, easy-to-use directory.
http://www.whowhere.com - find e-mail addresses, phone numbers and street addresses with this comprehensive directory.
Every day, millions of people use electronic mail to communicate with friends and family and to conduct business. But if you think your e-mail is private, guess again. E-mail is as private as a postcard. Unlike other forms of communication, such as telephone calls, which are protected in the United States under laws like The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, e-mail has little similar protection. The situation becomes even murkier for messages sent or received at the office.
You can protect yourself from prying eyes. First of all, regard e-mail as you would a postcard. Would you send confidential information this way? Obviously not. Second, use encryption software to encode your message so no one but the recipient can read it. You can download one of the most popular programs, PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for free from the Web.