1 Email Introduction
publication date: Jul 10, 2006
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author/source: Terry Robson - Silver IT Club
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I am a great fan of emails. Telephone calls demand attention immediately and frequently interrupt daily life. Emails politely wait.Every day, billions of e-mail messages are exchanged all over the world. If you are online a lot, you may send a dozen or more e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously, e-mail has become an extremely popular communication tool.
It is surely the most revolutionary change in human communications since the invention of the telephone.
In this series of articles I won’t delve too much into the technicalities except to give you a very simplified snapshot of what happens. I will rather concentrate on using emails to keep in touch with family and friends and to generally make life easier.
If you don’t yet use emails or don’t feel confident or are bamboozled by attachments this series aims to help you.
Follow the Trail
Just as a letter makes stops at different postal stations along the way to its final destination, e-mail passes from one computer, known as a mail server, to another as it travels over the Internet. Once it arrives at the destination mail server, it's stored in an electronic mailbox until the recipient retrieves it. This whole process can take seconds, allowing you to quickly communicate with people around the world at any time of the day or night.
In other words if I send you an email it goes from my computer to my server, which then passes it in to your server. It then sits on your server until you go online again when it is sent to your machine. If we were both online this transaction would take mere seconds.
Webmail is different. Hotmail and Yahoo are examples of Webmail. I imagine Hotmail more as giant set of pigeonholes. When I send you a Hotmail email it goes to your Hotmail pigeonhole. When you next logon to Hotmail you will effectively be looking in your pigeonhole via the Internet. If you reply your reply will sit in my pigeonhole and I won’t see it until I log in to Hotmail again. The advantage of this is that I can see my Hotmail emails from any computer in the world that has Internet access.
When you switch your computer off your ordinary emails are on your machine but your web emails are not.
Most people will regularly use both. For my business I use regular email. For my daughter I use Hotmail, especially when she is abroad.
This series will take you through the basics. Stick with it until emails are part of your daily life.