PC Help Jansant - A Beginners Guide to E-mail

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E-mail Guide - a beginners guide to e-mail

Before you can send or receive e-mail you need to have an e-mail account. Most Internet service providers (ISPs) include an e-mail account when you sign up for an Internet connection. Your e-mail address will look like this;

yourusername@yourISP.com

Many people choose not to use this e-mail account for various reasons. The main reason being that if you move to another ISP, you also have to notify all your friends of the change in e-mail address. For this reason many people choose to use a free web-based account. Not so long ago web-based accounts were limited by tiny inbox sizes, limiting the size of attachments (i.e.photos) and amount of mail that could be stored. Lately however companies such as Google (gmail) have free e-mail accounts with massive storage space such as 6GB. The other advantage these accounts have is that your e-mail is available via a web-browser anywhere in the world you access the Internet. Also it means you don't need to install configure an e-mail client on your computer. A client being a computer term for a client of a server, in this case e-mail servers.

If you decide to use the mail address provided with your Internet connection, you will need to install an e-mail client on your PC. Most operating systems by default install an e-mail client. There are 2 separate settings when your configuring your client to send and receive e-mail;

A SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) is the server that is used to send your e-mail. It sends it to a server where it is stored until it is downloaded by the intended recipient.
A POP (post office protocol) server is the server the message is stored on until you connect to the Internet to download your e-mail's.
Both e-mail servers require that your provide a username and password. You must also provide the Internet address of these servers e.g. pop.yourisp.com and smtp.yourisp.com. The user name may be the first part of the e-mail address before the @ symbol or your complete e-mail address, check with your ISP. Some ISPs for security reasons block access to their pop and/or smtp servers unless the user is connect to the Internet via their Internet connection service. If you intend to check your e-mail's from another Internet connection (an Internet cafe while on holidays) check with your ISP you can do this.

Spam (unsolicited e-mail) is a frustration and annoyance when using e-mail. While its almost impossible to avoid completely there are steps you can take to minimise it. Read the spam tutorial in the Internet guide section.

Attachments are computer files which you can send within your e-mail such as photos (jpg). The e-mail system is not really design to send files, the protocols it uses were really designed to send text messages. Not so long ago most people had mailbox limits of around 1MB and large attachments could crash e-mail servers. While that is not so much of an issue these days, people still have to download the message. If they're using a dial-up connect, large e-mail attachments are annoying because of the length of time they take to download. When sending file attachments keep this in mind. If you want to give large photo files to family and friends, why not put up a family web-site, place the photos there, and send them a link to the page. Most ISPs also provide web space with your Internet connection account for just this reason. Then they can view and download them at their leisure. There is a file transfer protocol (FTP) specifically for sending and receiving files over the Internet, but its not very practical in such cases.

E-mail and attachments can contain viruses, most ISPs now scan mail passing through their servers. In any event you should always have your virus protection software operating when you download, read e-mail's, or open e-mail attachments.

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