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 so 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 download 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 refer back to the original documents 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 query or a new idea to someone else in New York in the United
States. 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 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. In the passage, the writer has listed some advantages of e-mails as a new way of communication, and finally gives us suggestions about making friends on Internet.