Internet has changed the art of writing letters to email. Email is one of the ways on
Internet to send messages to another person across the network. E-mail and postal
mail coexist in the present India. In our country, the reach of postal mail is far more
penetrative through technically you may claim that e-mail has the potential to reach
every village may be through mobile devices. The e-mail system has been designed on
the postal system that is why in email you have to write the email address of the
sender and the recipient. In case the address of the receiver is incorrect the mail is
undelivered and returns back to the sender. The advantages of e-mail over postal mail
may be:
- E-mail is faster than postal mail.
- E-mail cannot be lost like letters and can be stored for life long.
- It can be edited and forwarded to other users.
- Emails are not affected by distances. It can be sent anywhere in world in seconds unlike postal mails.
- You can add video and audio with the e-mail.
. . . The disadvantages of email over postal mail are:
- There must be computer or alternatively suitable mobile devices and network connection should be available at sender and recipient side unlike postal mails.
- There is a need of knowledge of opening email account and how email can be sent. There is no such knowledge is required for postal mail.
2.4.1 History of E-mail
Internet based E-mail system was designed by a Computer engineer - Ray Tomlinson
in late 1971 while working with ARPANET. Tomlinson used a file transfer protocol
to send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPANET network. The first
email was sent between two computers that were actually sitting beside each other but
connected through ARPANET.
The first important email standard was called SMTP, or simple message transfer
protocol. SMTP was very simple and is still in use - however, SMTP has a problem –
it makes no attempt to find out whether the person claiming to have sent a message is
actually the same person. This basic flaw in the protocol was later to be exploited by
viruses and worms, and by security frauds and spammers forging identities. Some of
these problems are still being addressed.
In 2004, when Internet standards for email began to mature the POP (or Post Office
Protocol) servers began to appear as a standard - before that each server was a little
different. POP was an important standard to allow users to develop mail systems that
would work with each other.
Now Internet mail is defined by a large number of standards and recommendations by
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). However, only a few of the protocols
used in Internet mail are full IETF standards. Most of these standards are being used
by for people writing Internet mail software.
2.4.2 How to create Email Account?
For sending or receiving email, you need to have to an email account. The email
account may be provided by the organization for which you are working or else you
can create an account with web based email providers. If you are working on mail
services provided by your organization‘s mail server, you have to install and use email
client software such as Microsoft Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, Apple Mail client,
Mozilla Thunderbird etc. On the other hand if you are using web based mail services
then you may use the mail services offered by any of the web based mail service
providers. Some of these web based mail providers are – Windows Live mail, Yahoo
mail, Gmail, Rediffmail, and many more. In this section we discuss about the process
of creating an email account with the web mail service. Although for example we
have selected Gmail, you must try creating account with at least 3-4 such services and
choose the one that suites you the most. It is also worth mentioning here is that most
of these web e-mail programs work in a similar way.
Start the browser and Open the Gmail Homepage www.gmail.com. The screen similar
to Figure 2.10 may appear on your system. Select the ―Create an Account‖ button on
the right.
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| Figure 2.11: The Screen for entering information and creating an account |
Fill all the fields and click ―I accept. Create my account‖ If you have not made any mistake then your account will be created, otherwise the error will be displayed. Correct the errors and try again. Now you have created your account.
Activity 8: Open your account with at least 3-4 web mail services.
Next time you visit the Gmail website, you can now you access your account as:
Enter the username and password (as shown in Figure 2.12) and click ―Sign in‖
button.
Now you can access your account. An email account, in general has the following folders:
Inbox: Inbox is the main folder in your email account. It contains all the e-mails that
have arrived in your e-mail account. You can click on inbox to see the mails that you
have not read (shown in bold) as well as the mails that you have already read (in
normal font).
Sent Mail: It shows all the e-mails sent by you from your e-mail account.
Drafts: This folder stores those messages that you have created but have not been sent
by you so far. These messages are saved by you for more work.
Spam: Spam is unsolicited e-mails or junk mails. It is generally e-mail advertising
sent to group of people. We can also term spam as unwanted e-mails. Spam mails are
also a big cause of computer viruses. Spam mails are identified by the mail services
and placed in this folder. These spam mails are automatically deleted after few days.
Trash: Any deleted mail is put in the Trash folder. Trash folder allows you to get
back an e-mail which have already been deleted. But it is important to know that you
can get back the mails only within few days from trash after its deletion. After few
days, mails are permanently deleted from trash folder.
An email account, in general has the following options:
Compose Mail: Composing is addressing, writing, and sending an e-mail message.
By clicking on the Compose Mail button a window appears where we can write our
message in the message box and the email addresses of the person we want to send the
mail.
Contacts: The Contacts helps you to find email address of a person whom you have
saved in your Contact list. We can also quickly find email conversations associated
with a contact, and store additional information about our other persons whose email
id is stored in our contacts (such as a mailing address, title, phone number, etc).
Now, if you want to read your mails then click ― Inbox‖(Figure 2.13)
If you want to send email then click ―composes mail‖ and screen as shown in Figure 2.14 will appear.
In the To field you have to put the address of the receiver. In case you want to send
email to more than one receiver then put commas between their email addresses or
you can use ―add cc‖ or ―add bcc‖.
Cc stands for Carbon copy the persons whose address is listed in this field will receive
carbon copy of the message and Bcc means blind carbon copy similar to Cc but only
difference is that the recipient who had got Bcc is invisible to other recipients.
Subject : The main heading of your mail i.e., it will explain that the mail is regarding
which issue. Please note that the subject should be descriptive of the mail to help the
receiver understand what mail is about without having to open the mail.
Text Area : The message is written in this area.
When all the required fields are filled as shown in Figure 2.14, you can send the mail
by clicking the Send button.
