4th July 2008

Beginners Guide To Email and the Email system

Email is short for electronic mail and is now one of the most popular ways of communicating with friends, family and business colleagues, below is a brief description of what it is and how it works :

Before you can send or receive emails you need to get yourself an email address, this will be 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, you will probably find that if you use a FREE email service such as Yahoo® or Hotmail®, and you don't have an unusual name then your name will be taken, if it is you will have to improvise a little, putting numbers after your name is a common way around this problem.

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 your phone bill (which 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 server (your email providers computer) until the person of whom it is intended for reads it and deletes it. For example, when someone sends you an email, the message will stay available until you have read and deleted it (giving you the choice of when to read them).

If you have an email provider that offers a POP (Post Office Protocol) server then you can download your messages straight onto your machine, thus reducing the time you are online to read them, in the same way if your email provider offers an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server then you will be able to write your messages offline (not connected) and then just connect for the few seconds it takes to send it. These can be important factors when choosing an email provider.

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, this is an easy way of doing things, the only drawback would be if you wanted to leave the ISP and go somewhere else, then you would have to change your email address too.

To get around this some people have an account with a FREE permanent email provider aswell, you may not get a phone number to phone when you get into difficulty, but the support they normally provide on their websites can usually put you back on track.

So, in summary, if you have an ISP that provides you with an email address you will normally receive very good support, but it might be an idea considering a FREE email address aswell just in case you change your ISP.