email is short for electronic mail

You can send and receive letters through the internet, these letters are sent instantly throughout the globe. The letter is stored in a mail-box (which is storage space on an Internet Service Provider's hard disk) until the recipient checks his or her mail.

Email has a different feeling from letters and faxes. Because it is paperless, email can seem more whimsical, and messages are often shorter, sparser. You will find your own email style as you write and read email.

In order to use email you must have:

your own email address supplied by your Internet Service Provider

for example earthlink, micronet and aol are ISPs

email software

for example Eudora, or the mail that comes with Nestcape or Explorer

the email address of the person you want to send email to

email addresses are of the form:

loginname@serviceprovider.prefix

for example my email address is

bbjamin@micronet.fr

where bbjamin is my login name

micronet is the ISP company that provides me internet service

.fr ("dot F R") is a country prefix, it stands for France

other common prefixes are

.com ("dot com"), which stands for a US company and

.edu ("dot E D U") for a US educational institution.

email addresses do not have spaces, and caps don't matter

email software is included in Netscape and Explorer

In Netscape, go under the Window menu & select Netscape Mail

In Explorer, click the envelope icon to the left of X icon

I prefer to use Eudora Light free software dedicated only to email

When you reply to email, most email software has a feature that automatically quotes the original letter.

You can also forward email to other recipients.

You can also send email messages with attachments, which are files. This feature enables you to send pictures or formatted word processing documents with your email. (Note that compuserve and aol has had some problems with sending or receiving attachments from non compuserve or aol users).

 

To send an attachment in Eudora Light, go under the message menu and select attach file.

emoticons are attempts to draw with text, they are rampant in email and are deciphered by tilting your head to the left.

For example ;-) is a winking and smiling face

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