First Contact

E-Mail

E-Mail is a nice, cheap way to stay in touch. Regardless of where the recipient is, E-Mail can find the person and deliver the message along with attachments almost instantaneously. Instead of sitting down at your typewriter and typing a letter with all the mistakes you might make, running to the post office and then waiting a week or more for your letter to be delivered and another week for a response, you can sit down at your computer and send exactly what you want to say. When you send it, it's delivered as soon as the recipient logs onto the Internet regardless of where that person is.

There are several E-Mail programs available - Netscape Messenger, Outlook Express, Outlook, etc. I will use Outlook here, but E-Mail is just about as easy with any other E-Mail program. When you bring up Outlook, it will look something like this:

The First Message

Where would you click when you wanted to write a new message? On , of course. This brings up a screen that looks something like this:

Although this may look a little bit intimidating at first, we can cover the essential elements and get you sending E-Mail to your friends and family rather quickly. Let's begin with the top-most entry point.

The Recipient

What's the for? The E-Mail address of the person you want to send your message to goes here. An E-Mail address looks something like this - hughes@hugheshelpdesk.com. When you write a letter, you put the name and address of the recipient on the envelope so the post office knows how to deliver your letter. This is exactly the same except that you don't use street, city and state for the address.

The Sender

What about the return address. Well, since your E-Mail address should remain the same, Outlook automatically attaches that to the E-Mail when it sends it to the recipient. If Outlook is set up properly, you don't need to worry about that part.

Carbon Copy

Suppose you want to send the same E-Mail to more than one person. In this case, you would use the field to hold additional E-Mail addresses. The program will make sure that each address you enter receives a copy of the message just like the person does.

Blind Carbon Copy

Although you may not see it, you also have a field. Addresses you put in here will also receive a copy of the E-Mail, but no one will see the addresses you place here - hence the reason this is called "Blind" carbon copy.

Explaining E-Mail Addresses

Okay, what is this E-Mail address all about? How do I know one E-Mail address from another? These are good questions with relatively easy answers. For example, my address is hughesg-at-hugheshelpdesk-dot-com (hughes@hugheshelpdesk.com). Parts of this may look familiar while other parts may not make much sense. Let's take another look at it.

Forming E-Mail Addresses

An email address nowadays always contains an "@." This means "at" and serves as a separator. To the left is the user name of a person "at" a domain to the right. The domain can be an Internet Service Provider (ISP), for example. In my case it's "hugheshelpdesk.com". But "microsoft.com" or "whitehouse.gov" are also domains. At "microsoft.com", you could have "bill" and "steve". Their E-Mail addresses would be "bill@microsoft.com" and "steve@microsoft.com", respectively.

Every Message Has a Subject

It's a good idea to always provide a clue as to what you are talking about in your E-Mail. You do this in the field. This is what the recipient sees first so you want to catch their attention by providing something meaningful.

Writing the Message

The large area that looks like

is where you type the actual message. This is called the 'body' of the E-Mail. Just type the text of your message there.

Okay, can you type in bold, or even include pictures with your E-Mail? The answer is "Yes", but I'd rather not go into that just yet. We'll talk about that later. If you use bold face and fancy fonts it's not certain the recipient will see the same as you do. Maybe all he/she will receive is meaningless letters and characters. And you don't want that, do you?

Sending

Once you have the message written, addressed and with a subject, you simply click on the button and the E-Mail is ready to be sent. The final operation is to tell Outlook to actually send your E-Mail. You do this by clicking on the button in Outlook.

How E-Mail Travels

If you write a letter, you place it in an envelope, address it and place a stamp on it. You then hand it to the mailman. This is the same as pressing the button. What does the mailman do with it? He looks at the address and then carries it to the nearest post office.

The same happens with your E-Mail message. Your E-Mail program sends the message to the nearest E-Mail server. E-Mail servers are the post offices of the Internet. The program will have a look at the recipient's E-Mail address, then it sends the message on to the E-Mail server nearest to the recipient.

The recipient's E-Mail software plays the role of the mailman. It connects to the E-Mail server and fetches the latest messages from there. The messages are then presented to the recipient, and whomever you sent your E-Mail to can read it on their screen. All this happens within seconds, no matter where you send your E-Mail all over the world.

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