E-mail stands for electronic mail. It is by far the most popular activity on the internet and will probably replace snail mail for good.
Email is popular for many reasons including the ease of use, the speed or delivery and the availability of free e-mail like Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape etc. In this topic, we will cover two types of e-mail.
Web mail has exploded ever since hotmail was introduced a few years ago. You need to have access to the internet for this e-mail to work. It is a browser based e-mail which runs inside of your browser. The nice part about web mail is that you can get your e-mail anywhere in the world as long as you have access to the internet or the world wide web (www). Some of the popular sites for web mail are
Yahoo
Hotmail
Excite
Netscape
All these web mail share some common features like Inbox, Outbox, Folders, etc. Lets look in detail at one of them. Since hotmail is by far the most popular, we will discuss it in more detail.
When you get to Hotmail, click on New user. You will have to fill personal information like your name, address, age etc. You will also choose a user name and password which are used for security reasons. You do not want other people looking at your e-mail, do you. Your user name will become part of your e-mail address like this
username@hotmail.com
When you log into hotmail again, it will prompt you to enter your user name and password. Once you log into your account, you will see options like
This is just a sample bar. The actual bar may look different. I just want to discuss these options one at a time
Inbox:
This is where all the incoming mail is stored. When you want to look at new mail messages, this is where you go. Once you have read a mail, you can either keep it, delete it or forward it or store it in a folder. We will talk more about Folders in just a moment.
Compose:
When you want to send a message, you will use this option. When you click on this button, a new web page opens up. It has a text box that says To; you enter the person's e-mail address here. It has another box that says Subject; you enter subject of your e-mail in here. Then you type your message in the big box. When you are done, you click on the Send button and that's it. You just emailed your first message.
Here is what the window looks like
Address
Book:
This is where you want to save all the important e-mail address of friends, family and colleagues. You can enter supplemental information like name, address, phone, birthday etc. in here
Folders:
You can create folders in your account in order to sort your e-mail. For example you could create a folder and call it "family". Any mail from family members can be stored in this folder. The way to do that is once you read your e-mail, click on Move To (located towards the bottom) and select the appropriate folder. One word of caution is that you will have to monitor the size of your folders as web mails give you a certain amount of space. In hotmail, it is 2 MB which stores a lot of messages.
Options:
This section lets you control your mailbox properties. You can block senders, change personal information, change passwords, set new preferences for your e-mail account.
Outlook is an all-purpose
contact manager that handles two primary functions. It enables you to send, receive and organize e-mail; it also includes folders that enable you to organize all sorts of personal information, including schedules, phone numbers, addresses, and to-do lists. This is what the gui for Outlook looks like.
If you
notice, the interface looks a lot like the Windows Explorer. On the left
side, we have folders like Calendars, Contacts, Inbox, Notes etc. In the
right side, you have incoming mail messages. On the top, you have the menu
bar and a tool bar. We are going to discuss a few things here.
Create
a new message?
If you
look under the File, you will see an icon where it says New. Go ahead and
click on it. This will give you a new dialog box that looks like this
Type the email address after the To..., enter another
address for Cc... if you like, enter a Subject matter and fill the big text
area with the message. After you are done, click Send to send the email
message
Reply
to a message?
If you
go back to the previous image on Outlook GUI, you will see the following
options
Reply lets you send an email message to the sender
Reply to All lets you send a message to everyone that
was on the original email
Forward
a message?
Next to
the Reply options, you will see the Forward icon. Use this to forward the
email to another person not on the original list of addresses.
Note:As
part of the Internet Explorer, you get Outlook Express which is a more stripped down version of MS Outlook.
