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Exercises
E-mail
By Robert Snedden
Imagine being able
to send a letter to someone, anywhere in the world, that included pictures and
sounds as well as written words, and not even have to put a stamp on it. With
e-mail you can do just that. E-mail allows you to send messages quickly
and easily to other people using computers rather than the postal service. To
the Internet user, the ordinary post is known as "snail mail" because it is
so much slower than e-mail, which can deliver its message to the other side
of the world in seconds.
In some ways, e-mail is like a cross between a letter and a telephone call.
You type a note or a letter on your screen and then you send it down the telephone
line to another person for as little as it costs you to call your service provider.
Whether your message is going to Calgary in Canada or to Copenhagen in Denmark,
it will cost the same.You can
even attach a file from your computer, whether it be a sound, an image or a
text, to your e-mail message.
E-mail addresses are made up of two distinct parts, separated by the
"@" sign.
The first part of the address identifies the specific user. Many people use
their names, or their initials or a nickname. After the @ sign comes the host
address or node name, which is the actual place where the user's electronic
mailbox is situated. Here is an example. My e-mail address is "november@dircon.co.uk."
I picked "November" because that was the month in which I was born, and "dircon"
is the Direct Connection, my service provider, a commercial company based in
the UK. Easy, isn't it?
When a new user joins the Internet for the first time, he or she will get an
e-mail address that allows the user both to send and receive messages.
Just as you need to put the correct address on an envelope to make sure it gets
to the right place, so you must also put the correct e-mail address on your
electronic correspondence. Computers are not as understanding as postmen and women, who can sometimes work
out where a wrongly addressed letter is meant to go. If you make a slight mistake
with your address, your message will simply be bounced right back to you.
How do you find out what someone's e-mail address is? Naturally, the easiest
and best way is simply to ask them. Because there is no one in charge of the
whole Internet and because it is expanding so rapidly, there is no complete
record anywhere of everyone who is connected.
When someone sends you a message via e-mail, it will be stored on the computer
at your service provider, or if your school has its own connection to the Internet,
on the main server. Once you have logged on to the Net you can launch your e-mail
program. Eudora is one of the most popular and easy-to-use programs and is available
for both Macintosh and IBM compatibles. There is a version that you can
free of charge from the Internet. Many programs will automatically search for
new messages when they are first launched.
E-mail has obvious advantages
for schools and businesses that want to keep track of their messages. For
example, it allows you to quote all or part of the message you are replying
to, without having to type it all out again. The handy thing about this
feature
is that if you are answering questions, you can keep them in your reply. This
saves the other person having to
back to the original document when he or she gets your reply.
Another thing e-mail allows you to do is to forward a message on to someone
else. If someone sends you a piece of information that you feel would be of
interest to another person, you can send a copy of the message to him.
Again this is invaluable for large organizations that might have offices all
over the world. For example, someone in the London office might send a
or a new idea to someone else in New York in the USA. He, realizing that this
is something that another person in Sydney in Australia has been working on,
passes the message on almost instantly.
If you want to send a graphics file (one containing a picture), a sound file,
a document or a video clip with your e-mail, you can do that too. Most e-mail
readers have a menu item that allows you to attach a file using an instruction,
or command, called "attach file" or something similar. To do this the e-mail
program uses MultiPurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to attach the file
and process it into the chunks of the right size for sending via e-mail.
If the Internet has any lasting effect on our lives it may well be through
the use of e-mail. As we have seen, there are many advantages that e-mail enjoys
over snail mail in terms of speed and usefulness. It also has a big advantage
over a message taken over the telephone－you cannot print out a telephone call.
Probably more people join the Internet to get access to e-mail than for any
other reason.
E-mail is easy to use and it saves time and money. The differences in time
in different parts of the world do not matter when sending e-mail. It is a twenty-four-hour
service that allows you to send information at any time of the day or night.
If you want to know what it is like to live in the Arctic, send a message to
a school in Alaska and find out. If a company wants to know how much it costs
to print a book in the Far East, it can e-mail some printers in Singapore or
Hong Kong. The message will be there the next time someone at the other end
switches on his or her computer and logs on. No one has to be there to answer
the telephone. It does not matter if they are in bed when you send the message,
or you are watching a film at the cinema when they send a reply.
If you want to make friends on the Internet, it is just as well to have good
manners. One of the most important rules to follow is, DON'T TYPE ALL OF YOUR
MESSAGES IN CAPITAL LETTERS. It
is the Internet equivalent of shouting down the telephone. Be careful how
you say things. Because it is so fast and easy to send e-mail messages, people
often do not bother to check what they have written before pressing the "send"
button. Write your e-mail with the same care and attention you would use for
other forms of communication. Reply to your messages promptly. If someone has
taken the trouble to write to you, take the trouble to write back. It is only
polite.
(1,158 words)
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