Chapter 2

E-Mail (Electronic Mail) - Why should I use email?
E-mail is the transmission of memos and messages over a network. Within an enterprise, users can send mail to a single recipient or broadcast it to multiple users. With multitasking workstations, mail can be delivered and announced while the user is working in an application. Otherwise, mail is sent to a simulated mailbox in the network server or host computer, which must be interrogated.

An e-mail system requires a messaging system, which provides store and forward capability, and a mail program that provides the user interface with send and receive functions. The Internet revolutionized e-mail by turning countless incompatible islands into one global system.

The Internet initially served its own members, of course, but then began to act as a mail gateway between the major online services. It then became "the" messaging system for the planet. In 1998, it delivered more than 3.4 trillion messages in the U.S.

Sending Mail
Most Internet users have an e-mail address which takes the form of his or her name, the @ (at), and a domain name, such as roconnor@yahoo.com. The domain name contains the name of the person’s service provider or organization and often its country, each separated by a dot. The domain name yahoo.com stands for Yahoo, which is a commercial Internet organization (com). E-mail offers you more than a quick and easy way to send people written messages. It is possible to use e-mail to send computer data, such as word-processed documents and images.

Composing an e-mail message is similar to writing a letter and sending it to someone via the United States Postal Service. You create text, you address it with an accurate address, and sometimes you even write a note on the envelope to indicate something special about the contents inside, such as “personal” or “urgent.”

The biggest difference between e-mail and USPS mail is the speed at which your message is delivered to the recipient. After you use e-mail and get used to its almost instantaneous delivery system, you’ll begin to understand why computer users have adopted the jargon “snail mail” for mail sent through the USPS. To compose a message in most email programs; you carry out the following three steps, all of which are quite easy:

• Fill out the message header. (The message header is the top part of the message form, where you insert the name/s) of the recipient, the subject, and other information about the message.)
• Write the message.
• Send the message.

Opening Mail
Mail you receive is stored in the Inbox of your mailbox. You can see the list of messages in the Contents pane by selecting the Inbox object in your E-mail’s Folder pane.

When you see the list of messages in the Contents pane, the header information helps you decide which messages to read immediately and which messages to leave for later. You can use the priority icons and the subject matter to decide, or you can just pick messages sent by people you like to hear from.

Scroll through the list to find a message you want to open. Double-click it, and the message opens in a message window. The buttons on the message window toolbar provide quick access to many of the options you might need for working with received messages.