Email is short for electronic mail and is now one of the most popular ways of communicating with friends, family and business colleagues.

In this guide we give you a description of what it is and how it works.

Getting an email address

Before you can send or receive emails you need to get yourself an email address.

This will consist of a unique combination of letters and/or numbers. You can get an email address by signing up for an account with an email provider, the email address will look something like this:

yourname@provider.com

The first part before the @ symbol will be your choice of name, often referred to as your username.

You will probably find that if you use a FREE email service such as Yahoo®, Hotmail®, or Gmail® and you don't have an unusual name, then your actual name will already be taken by someone else. If it is taken then you will have to improvise a little, putting numbers after your name is a common way around this problem or some people use their nicknames, but again, common nicknames will probably already be taken.

If you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider) then you will normally get an email address within your package, along with a POP & SMTP server (see below). This is an easy way of doing things, the only drawback would be if you wanted to leave your provider and go somewhere else, as you would then have to change your email address too.

Choosing a password for your email account

When signing up for your email account you will be asked to provide a password to enable you to access the account.

Choosing a good password is a vital part of keeping your email account secure. There are many methods you can use for choosing a password that will be both easy for you to remember and secure enough that nobody can guess it.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your password:

Never use just your name or anything else obvious such as the name of a pet or sibling.
Try and include numbers in your password to make it more difficult to guess.
Always use more than 8 characters in your password, in fact, most email accounts require a minimum amount of characters.
Finally, choose a password that you will remember! It is not good practice to leave a note next to your computer with your password written on it.

Once you have your email address

After you have signed up for an email account you will be able to send and receive electronic messages through your PC. It doesn't cost anything to send or receive these messages apart from the cost of your Internet connection. If you are using a dial-up connection it should be the price of a local call.

When you send an email, and likewise when someone sends you an email, the message will remain on the mail server (your email provider's computer) until the person it is intended for, reads it and deletes it. This is a useful feature of emails which differs from a phone call that needs to be answered at that instant.

If you have opted for a free email address then to view and send your emails you will usually need to go to their respective website. For example, if you signed up for a Yahoo email account you would visit the Yahoo website and enter your email address and password, you could then send and view messages. This system, referred to as web-based email, is very useful if you travel and/or use different computers to access your emails.

If you have an email provider that offers a POP (Post Office Protocol) server then you can download your messages straight onto your machine via what is referred to as email client software, such as Microsoft's Outlook®, therefore reducing the time you need to be online to read them.

In the same way if your email provider offers an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server you will be able to write your messages offline (not connected to the Internet), then just connect for the few seconds it takes to send it.

The POP and SMTP features can be important factors when choosing an email provider if you are using a pay-per-minute Internet connection, such as dial-up.