Electronic Mail (E-mail)

ELECTRONIC MAIL (E-MAIL)

A common resource provided by the internet is a worldwide system for sending and receiving electronic mail, known as E-mail. Imagine that you live in Benue and wish to send a letter to your friend living in Abuja. After properly addressing the envelop, you mail it, starting the letter’s journey. At a postal facility, the letter is routed to the next location, perhaps a regional or national distribution centre, and then to a local Post Office near your friend.

Read about World Wide Web (WWW)

A similar process occurs with E-mail. After your letter is composed on your computer, you must specify an E-mail address that identifies your friend. Once you send this electronic letter, it travels from your computer, often through a device called a Modem which connects your computer to the internet via the telephone network. Off it goes, bound for various computers that act like local and national postal routing facilities. They have enough information to get the letter to a destination computer, where your friend can retrieve it.

Unlike regular mail, E-mail often reaches its destination, even on other continents, in minutes or less unless some part of the network is heavily congested or temporarily out of order. When your friend inspects his electronic mailbox, he will discover your E-mail. The speed of E-mail and the ease with which it can be sent even to multiple recipients all over the world make it a popular form of communication.

Electronic mail (e-mail), as distinct from postal mail, is a powerful communication tool used by millions of people to send messages to other people. As an electronic communication different from paper-based communication, it is now the most widely used internet service. Internet mail is connected to most other e-mail systems. As a communication system, the e-mail is superior to any of the communication systems.

 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN E-MAIL AND OTHER COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

The Postal System

This is extremely slow and takes days, weeks, and sometimes month to reach its destination, if at all. You will need envelopes, buy postage stamps, and go to the post office to post it, the e-mail is quicker to compose, arrives faster, and requires neither stamps nor envelopes. It requires no paper.

E-mail sent from Delta, Abuja, Kano or Makurdi to someone in London will be received within seconds. When the mail is successfully delivered, the computer will tell you. If it cannot be delivered, the computer will bring back the mail and tell you why your message could not be delivered.

The Telephone

If the other person is not there, you will not be able to speak to him or her. If he or she has an answering machine, you can leave a message. You can read the e-mail when you feel like. You need not interrupt what you were doing, like you would, to answer the telephone.

The Fax Machine

A fax may be difficult to incorporate in another document, or fax to someone else and still remain readable. E-mail remains legible, no matter how many times its have been forwarded.

FEATURES OF E-MAIL

Protocol

In sending e-mail, you have to follow protocol. Protocol is a system or rules and standards for communicating over a network, particularly the Internet. Computers and networks interact according to protocols. These protocols determine how each side expects the other to behave in the transfer of information. For example, if you addressed an ordinary letter to Aron instead of Aaron and the address is correct, the letter will still be delivered. In a network, no mistake, no matter how minor, is allowed. E-mail addressed to Aron instead of Aaron will be returned by the computer, giving the reason for non-delivery as “host unknown”.

Address

Identifying people connected to the Internet is accomplished with E-mail addresses. Addresses are as important in e-mail as in ordinary correspondence. E-mail addresses consist of three main elements. These are;

·         Mail box name already in the computer

·         The sign, @ before host name;

·         Host name.

The following e-mail address, for example, contains each of the above elements: 

aaron@gmail.com.

The e-mail box name is aaron, and gmail is the host name. But it should be noted that mailbox names could contain letters of the alphabet, numerals, or some punctuation characters. Whether you use capital or small letters in your e-mail address does not matter. To save space, the use of small letters is most common. What matters is protocol. For example, commas and spaces are not allowed in Internet mailbox addresses. If a mailbox address contains any of these, the computer will not deliver your mail. For example, if the e-mail address is raheem@LSE.AC.UK, and you addressed it as raheem@L.S.E.AC.UK, the computer will return the mail undelivered because it knows LSE and not L.S.E.

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Format for Sending Email

Your E-mail Address             

Your e-mail address will depend on whether your access to the Internet is through an Internet Service Provider or through the computer in our bank. Online service providers facilitate easy access to the Internet. There are three most popular online service providers. These are, Google Mail (Gmail), Yahoo mail (Yahoo), America Online (AOL), CompuServe, and the Microsoft Network (MSN) etc.

To access the Internet through any of the above online service providers, you have to use your log-in. your log-in name is the name, which you have typed into the computer so that the computer can identify you and open its doors for you whenever you want to operate it. Suppose your log-in name is Viola and your online service provider is Google (gmail), your e-mail address may be viola@gmail.com.

Suppose viola, instead, was connected through a workplace computer and the computer is rahmat.co.ng,  his/her e-mail address may then be viola@rahmat.co.ng. if Viola was using a microcomputer that is not connected continuously to the Internet, but to a central mail server, then he would use his/she log-in to contact the central mail server.

Additional Example of e-mail address: Imagine that you wish to send E-mail to a friend whose E-mail address is doosh@eddtolad.com. In this example, the person’s identity, or log-in is “doosh”. People often use their initials or full name as their log-in ID. The term following the “@” symbol may be their employer, their place of business, or their E-mail service provider. In this case, “Eddtolad” identifies such a business. The past part of the address identifies the type of organization with which your friend has a log-in. In this case, “com” refers to a commercial organization. Educational organizations have a similar naming convention but end with “edu”, and non – profit organizations end with “org”. Another E-mail standard ends with the country’s code of the person. For example, the address habibatu@moneymaker.org.ng indicates that the person whose log-in is “habibatu” is affiliated with a firm termed “moneymaker” in Nigeria.