How to use e-mail

	Well, I assume that everybody knows what a mail is (You know, that little paper you put in an envelope, affix a stamp and throw it into a mail box). Internet also offers a mail service. Because this mail is sent electronically, it is called e-mail. E-Mail can be used nearly everywhere around the Internet. The most simple way is sending a mail to another person. you also can use e-mail in conjunction with mailinglists or you will need it to send an article to a Usenet Newsgroup. If you have an e-mail only connection, you can even use FTP, archie or the Usenet via e-mail. On details on how to do this, please refer to our Internet by E-Mail section. This section mirrors a great guide on how to use services via e-mail. This guide has been written by Bob Rankin.
	What do I need ? As with so many other services, you will need two things: An e-mail client and a server (sometimes even two). Of course you will also need an e-mail address which to send mail to. If you are using a unix terminal, then you probably already have a mail client. If you are looking for a mail client for a Mac or Windows, then have a look at the following list: Eudora Web Ink Pegasus Mail Microsoft Internet Mail and News Becky! Internet Mail DT Mail 32 Claris E-M@iler Snap Mail 2.0 Eudora Pro Quickmail Top
	Where can I connect ?
Normally there aren't any public POP or SMTP mail servers on the Internet. The Addresses of these servers will be given to you by your ISP. For the POP server you will also get a username and a password. Keep them in a safe place and do not tell anyone.	As mentioned above, if you are using mail from a Unix terminal, then you probably don't have to know any servers, etc. Your sysadmin already has done all for you. Otherwise you will have to know the address of a POP and SMTP server. POP is short for Post Office Protocol and is often used for receiving mail. SMTP is short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and often is used for sending mail. It might also happen, that the addresses for these two servers are identical; this means, that this server is used for sending and receiving mail. In your mail client, you have to enter these two addresses in a options dialog. Top
	How do I use e-mail ? The SMTP server for sending mail often is accessibly freely, which means, that you don't have to have a username and password in order to send mail. Please check with your ISP to verify this. In order to get you mail from the POP mail server (where all mail for you is stored) you have to know a username and a password (You don't want your mail read by someone else, do you ?). So this username and password also have to be told your mail client. Good mail clients somehow encrypt usernames and your password, so they are not readable to unauthorized persons. Furthermore you have to tell the client your e-mail address and, depending on the client you're using, your real name, company, etc. . Be sure to specify your e-mail address correctly, because otherwise responses won't reach you! An Internet e-mail address An e-mail address is made up of the following structure: name@domain where name is the name of the user you want to send mail to and domain is the address of the mail server, this person has an account on. Multiple people can have an e-mail address on the same server. You can tell by looking at the domain. Name usually is an abbreviation or a short of the persons real name. So if your name would be Fred Flintstone, your e-mail address could look something like FredFlintstone@Stone-Valley.com or FFlintstone@Stone-Valley.com or FF@Stone-Valley.com or FrFlint@Stone-Valley.com It is also possible to send mail to a commercial online service, like Compuserve or AOL. See below for details. Maintaining an e-mail account Normally, a person you are sending an e-mail to is not always online. This means, that the mail has to be stored somewhere. This is done by the POP server. On this server, there is some harddisk space reserved for your mail. The amount of space may vary between 512KB and 3 MB. Normally it is around 1 MB. Depending on the amount of mail you are receiving per day, log into your POP server and get all your mails. The procedure of connecting to your server and downloading your mail is an automated service, done by your mail client. You only have to tell your client to check for new mail. Depending on the client you will see a status message during this process, saying how much mail there is on your server and how many already has been downloaded. When sending a mail, there normally is no delay. It is uploaded to the SMTP server, which sends it right away. With some mail clients you have to tell the client explicitly to send the mail. Mail clients are designed to work offline; at least most of them do. This means, that you are downloading your mails, then disconnect. Then you will read your mail and reply to some. After typing your replys, they are stored in a queue on your harddisk. Now you log on to the internet again and tell your mail client to send the mails. Now they are sent on their way. As mentioned before, there is a fixed amount of harddisk space reserved for our mails. If you are receiving lots of mail, then you should check your mail daily or twice a day download and remove your mail from the server. Note that most mail clients have an option wether to remove the mail after it has been downloaded or leave it on the server. If you don't do so, your account will sooner or later run out of space and every incoming mail is getting bounced back and you won't receive any new mail. Sending and receiving e-mails This section shows an example of how to send and receive mail. It assumes that you are having a POP Mail account running. Lets say you want to send mail to Buggs Bunny (you know that little rabbit from Town Town). The first thing you have to do is, to tell you mail client that you want to send new mail. This command is normally located somewhere in a Message menu or you will find it on a toolbar. Select the appropriate command. Now a window will pop up. First you have to enter the e-mail address of the receiver. In our case we are using the imaginary e-mail address BuggsBunny@acme.com. As you might already have noticed, there is also a line which allows you to enter a subject. Use a short descriptive subject. It should tell the receiver the contents of your mail in 1 to 5 words. Mails without topics easily might get overlooked and trashed unread. Imagine you want to know something about Buggs Bunnies latest movie, then a suitable topic could be Your new movie Using new movie or movie alone could be a bit to less as it doesn't say which new movie. A topic like Can you tell me something about your latest Movie ? would be a bit too long. Next you can define a carbon copy (short: CC). This is a list of additional receivers of your mail. But be careful using CC. People getting a mail as a CC could think, that they aren't important to you. A CC is a good idea, if your boss wants you to mail him a copy of each outgoing mail. Then you would enter your boss's e-mail address in the CC field. Now type your message. Be aware, that your receiver might not be using the same client as you are and that some features might not be available to him. It's always a good idea not to use more than 70 columns of text. Otherwise your receiver might get the text truncated or something else, that makes it unreadable. Now you might want to add a signature. A signature are a few extra lines, that might contain your real name, voice phone and/or fax number or some "wise" words. Your signature should not exceed about four lines. Now tell your client to send the mail. If you have a permanent connection to the 'Net, then your mail might start its journey right away. If you are using a dial-up connection, then your mail will be stored in a queue and send when you are connecting the next time. Note that this behaviour usually has to be defined in your client's options. Some mail clients will send mail currently queued, when checking for new mail (like Eudora and Microsoft Exchange). When communicating with others via an electronic medium, you might to express your feelings or simply use abbreviations to shorten you writing. You can find some of them in the acronyms and abbreviations section. Well, there is nothing special about it. If you are not connected permanently to the 'Net, then connect and tell your client to check for new mail. If you are using a new mail client for the first time, it will ask you probably a username and a password. Depending on the client's settings, it will store them for later reuse. Your client will connect, download the mail onto your hard drive and then disconnect from the mail server. Depending on the settings, it will send any queued mail. After the downloading has finished, disconnect from the Internet (only if you have a dial-up connection of course). Now read your mail and reply to it. This is done by selecting a Reply command in your client. When replying to a mail, then a new window will open with the original message in. Now note the ">" character before each line. This is called quoting. This will help the sender of the mail to keep track on what you are replying to. Here is a little example. Let's say you have received the following message: Hi ! I was just wondering if you could send me details on your product xyz. I also tried to contact you via fax, but it seems that your fax number is misspelled in the catalog. Thanx. Replying to this mail might look like: >details on your product xyz. This product is blah blah blah >that your fax number is misspelled in the catalog. I have checked it and it is spelled correctly. Please try again As you might have noticed, the unnecessary parts of the mail has been deleted and the remaining pages do have the special character in front. With this reply the original sender of the mail can easily determine what you are referring to in your mail. Mails to and from Compuserve and AOL It's also possible to send and receive Mails to/in AOL and Compuserve. The following table shows, how to use internet e-mail to do so: Compuserve AOL to the Internet Realname,INTERNET: Name@Domain Name@Domain from the Internet: ID-Nr@compuserve.com (use a point instead of comma; 40569,4500 = 40596.4500) AOL-Name@aol.com Additional costs: 10 cents for the first 5500 lines, 2 cents for each further 5500 lines. None TABLE 2.2.1: E-Mail Addresses for sending e-mails to and from AOL and Compuserve Sending files Not only text can be sent via an e-mail. Certain encoding mechanisms allow the sending of binary data of the internet. Normally only characters of the 7-bit ASCII set can be transferred over the Internet. Because binary files also contain characters from the 8-bit set, the encoding is necessary. Two quasi-standards have been defined to send binary files. These two standards are called MIME and UUencode/UUDecode. All of the two standards do the same thing: Encode the binary file, so it can be sent over the 'Net. MIME is short for Multi Purpose Internet Mail Extension and is the modern standard. The other one often can be found when sending binary mails to a usenet newsgroup. Be sure to tell your client, which of the two encoding methods to use. When sending a binary file to a newsgroup it is a good idea to use UUEncodeing. For general mail, MIME is a good choice. However be sure to check with your receiver before sending for the capabilities of his mail client. Both of you need to have the same capabilities. After you have verified the correct settings, you can attach a binary file to your mail. Locate an Attach menu or button within your mail client. That's all you need to do. now write some lines and send the mail on its way. A note on sending files: Don't sent large files to people who didn't ask for it. You might be wasting their money. Let's say you are sending a 1 MB file to a person who doesn't want it. He has to download it and can't delete it from the server. So check with your receiver if he wants the file.
	There is also an encryption method called BinHex. This one is only used on the MacIntosh. It's no good idea to use this method (most mail clients don't even support it). We would recommend using MIME or UUEncoding, because these methods are available on many platforms. Top
	Additional Information Each mail that has been sent or received has got a header. This header contains information who has sent the mail, which address the reply should go to, which time the mail was received and much more. Here is an example of such a mail header (Note that some lines have been wrapped for presentation purposes: X-POP3-Rcpt: xxxxx@alijku06 Received: from alijku04.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at by alijku06.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at with SMTP id AA29397 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Thu, 29 Feb 1996 05:00:49 +0100 Received: from alijku21.edvz.Uni-Linz.AC.AT by alijku04.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at with SMTP id AA10744 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for ); Thu, 29 Feb 1996 04:56:17 +0100 Received: from ALIJKU21.BITNET by ALIJKU21.EDVZ.Uni-Linz.AC.AT (IBM MVS SMTP V3R1) with BSMTP id 7707; Thu, 29 Feb 96 05:01:04 CET Received: (from AWIUNI11.EDVZ.UNIVIE.AC.AT for via BSMTP) Received: (from MAILER@AWIUNI11 for MAILER@ALIJKU21 via NJE) (UCLA/Mail V1.500 M-RSCS9121-9121-553); Thu, 29 Feb 96 05:00:21 SET Received: from AEARN.ACO.NET (NJE origin LISTSERV@AEARN) by AWIUNI11.EDVZ.UNIVIE.AC.AT (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 0483; Thu, 29 Feb 1996 04:58:22 +0100 Return-Path: Message-Id: <199602290356.AA10744@alijku04.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 23:00:00 -0500 Reply-To: Microsoft Access Database Discussion List Sender: Microsoft Access Database Discussion List From: Automatic digest processor Subject: ACCESS-L Digest - 28 Feb 1996 To: Recipients of ACCESS-L digests Content-Type: text Content-Length: 18627 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Here are a few words on such a mail header. The X-POP3-RCPT section shows the receiver of the mail. All the Received entries are the paths, this mail was passed. I other words, these are all the major computers and routers, this mail has passed on its journey. Date shows the date the message was received. The -0500 shows the time difference between the sender and the receiver. Reply-To, Sender, From and Subject are self explanatory I think. The Content-Type and Content-Length are used for MIME encoding.

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