E-Mail, or electronic mail, is just mail sent between users electronically. E-Mail is the most productive, resource available on the Internet. The abililty to send messages electronically (and very quickly) has made "the world smaller".
The essential part of email is your address. Due to the nature of the Internet, the way it has grown and developed, with no one group or government regulating ot coordinating it, no centralised records have been kept or individual email addresses.
At the moment, therefore, there are no "white pages" for the intrnet where you can (easily) lookup other peoples email addresses. The best way is to phone up and ask your collegues what their email addresses is!
TIP: If you know your friend is connected to the Internet you may be able to find their email address by fingering their domain name
So, how do you understand your address?
You normally have a userid (your login name) and the domainname of the computer to which you connect to gain access to the Internet (which is separated by a @ symbol.
An Example:
If you were connecting to Netcom their domainname would be something like netcomuk.co.uk so, if you add your userid (loginname) to this domain your email address would look like:
loginname@netcomuk.co.uk
If you conneted to Enterprise their domainname is enterprise.net so, adding your userid (loginname) to this would result in your email address:
loginname@enterprise.net
If you are connected to someone like Demon Internet you may have a slightly different looking email address (just to make things more complicated!). Demon's domainname is demon.co.uk but your userid (loginname) goes between the @ sign and the domainname:
anything@loginname.demon.co.uk
In this example you can put anything where "anything" is! Demon offer you multiple email accounts by allowing you to put any mailbox before the @ sign! We have various accounts, for example:
| sales@active2.demon.co.uk |
| support@active2.demon.co.uk |
| chris@active2.demon.co.uk |
E-Mail addresse do differ within other countries. Usually it is the high-level domain that alters (the part which says which country the user lives). Here is a list of high-level domains for some countries.
| uk | United Kingdom |
| ie | Ireland |
| de | Germany |
| nl | The Netherlands |
| fr | France |
| no | Norway |
| se | Sweden |
| it | Italy |
| be | Belgium |
| au | Australia |
| jp | Japan |
| ru | Russia |
| za | South Africa |
| fi | Finland |
| ca | Canada |
There are two domains which apply "anywhere" in the world:
| com | Commercial Organisation |
| net | Network |
COM and NET really do not tell you where the recipient is based. ie. if you wanted to send a mail to loginname@company.net you wouldn't know where that company was situated (whereas if it had a .de or .it high-level domain you would know that the company was is Germany or Italy).
It is actually quite similar to the way the postal service works!
If, for example, I sent a letter from Darlington to London the post office would take my letter with all the other letters to London, taken to a sorting office and sorted for that area then delivered to its destination. The destination could be a mailbox which holds the mail until the receiver has time to collect his/her mail (ie. many companies use PO Boxes to store mail which can then be collated at specific and suitable times more than once a day in most cases).
The process for email is very similar. I create an email here in Darlington, which is destined for a person working in a company in Berlin (Germany). The mail is sent (by me) to my ISP (similar to posting a normal letter in the post box) who then "sorts" the mail and directs it to the correct country where it arrives at its destination. Usually this could be a company who then sorts the mail for each employee.
ie. stefan@company.de
The .de denotes that the mail is destined for Germany (de stands for Deutschland), the company part tells the sorter of the mail that it is destined for a company within Germany. Finally, the name stefan is most likely an employee working for the company with his own mailbox.
It is very useful. It is much cheaper and easier to send certain information via email than it is to send bu facsimile or normal post.
If, for example, you wanted to send the same fax to 15 people Internationally, this would be expensive and time consuming.
The same process could be done by email much more quickly and cheaply. To create a mail to be sent to "multiple" recipients is just a matter of putting all their email addresses in the to: section when you create an email. The best thing about this is that you only need to send it once!
Another good example is for a person who wants to send a picture, sound sample or some data to another person (or even persons).
You could send a disk by express air mail but this is very expensive and will still take 2 or more days. E-Mail allows you to attach data (such as files) to your mail messages!! The recipient would receive this within minutes and can decode the information immediately.
TIP: the term "Snail Mail" is a derogatory term used by Internet users to refer to ordinary mail, which is very very slow when compared to electronic mail.
Netiquette is just a collection of do's and don'ts when you are connected to the Internet. Mainly directed towards E-Mail and newsgroup users it is really a tradition or, some would say, culture that has been developed on the Internet.
One of the problems with electronic mail is that it is difficult to express sarcasm, humour, sadness, dissapointment so that the receiver fully understands what you are trying to say. Indeed on occassions many receivers can view what you have said in completely the wrong context. Say something sarcastic and the receiver may think you are waging a personal attack!
Generally, between friends, email mis-understandings are easily recognised as you begin to understand the other persons humour and style of writing. Newsgroups are much different: you are sending a message to, potentially, 1000's of receivers who will all view your message in a different way. These people will then flame you by sending a nasty response in return. You can easily start getting a name for yourself and (in extreme circumstances) be banned/warned off certain newsgroups.
Some things you should try and avoid when sending an email or message to a newsgroup:
If you are flamed you stand the chance of being banned or warned from using a newsgroup, IRC channel etc.
Most newsgroup readers work by using threads so a person reading your mail can easily refer to the previous message if they need to.
Smileys
Smileys are intended to portray a different "mood" or emotion.
| Smiley | Meaning of the Smiley |
|---|---|
| :-) | Happy or being funny |
| :-( | Sad/Frowning (Quite unhappy) |
| ;-) | Winking/Sarcastic |
| :-D | Laughing |
| :-O | Shocked |
| :-/ | Fairly negative |
| :-p | Sticking tongue out |
| :-| | Straight faced - quite negative (but not that unhappy) |
Using Abbreviations
You will find the abbreviations are very common in every day Internet life (email, newsgroups, IRC etc) mainly so phrases do not have to be written in full. Here are some common phrases:
| Abbreviation | Meaning |
|---|---|
| IMHO (or IMO) | In My (Humble) Opinion |
| AFAIK | As far As I Know |
| BTW | By The Way |
| FUBAR | Fed Up Beyond All Recognition |
| NRN | No Response Necessary |
| OTOH | On The Other Hand |
| ROTFL | Rolls On The Floor Laughing (action) |
| LOL | Laughs Out Loud (action) |
| RTFM | Read The Flipping Manual |
| ATM | At The Moment |
| FYI | For Your Attention |
| RSN | Real Soon Now |
| WTF | What The Flip? |
| CU (or CUL8R) | See You Later |
An electronic mail message has a specific structure to it that's common across every type of computer system.(4) A sample would be:
Received: from ajk.tele.fi ([131.177.5.20]) by relay-9.mail.demon.net
id aa912139; 1 Feb 97 14:10 GMT
Message-Id: <9702011411.AA11723@ajk.tele.fi>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 16:12:21 +0200
From: Tomi Ollila
Reply-To:
To: enquiries@active2.demon.co.uk
Cc: too@hirohito.ajk.tele.fi
Subject: NC Demo
Hi Chris,
I'm just testing latest demo.
I believe some of these things is thought by you too, So I just make sure
you have taken these into consideration :)
The `Date:' header contains the date and time the message was sent. Likewise, the "good" address (as opposed to "real" address) is laid out in the `From:' header. Sometimes it won't include the full name of the person (in this case `The President'), and may look different, but it should always contain an email address of some form.
The `Message-ID:' of a message is intended mainly for tracing mail routing, and is rarely of interest to normal users. Every `Message-ID:' is guaranteed to be unique.
`To:' lists the email address (or addresses) of the recipients of the message. There may be a `Cc:' header, listing additional addresses. Finally, a brief subject for the message goes in the `Subject:' header.
The exact order of a message's headers may vary from system to system, but it will always include these fundamental headers that are vital to proper delivery.
When an email address is incorrect in some way (the system's name is wrong, the domain doesn't exist, whatever), the mail system will bounce the message back to the sender, much the same way that the Postal Service does when you send a letter to a bad street address. The message will include the reason for the bounce; a common error is addressing mail to an account name that doesn't exist. For example, writing to Simon Edwards at the Royal Institute of Technology at Melbourne will fail, because his account name has changed (although it wasn't know when the original message was sent).