H o w E m a i l W o r k s

1. H o w E m a i l W o r k s YAHOO GOOGLE M S N NETSCAPE EMBARQ FIREFOX NETZERO

2. Harness E-Mail:How It Works It can take days to send a letter across the country and weeks to go around the world. To save time and money, more and more people are relying on electronic mail. It's faster, easy, and much cheaper than the using the post office. "snail mail" = regular mail

3. Sending and Receiving Messages To receive e-mail, you need an account on a mail server. This is similar to having a street address where you receive letters.One advantage over regular mail is that you can retrieve your e-mail from any location on earth, provided that you have Internet access.   emoticons

4. What is e-mail? In its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from one device to another. While most messages go from computer to computer, e-mail can also be sent and received by mobile phones, PDAs and other devices. In a very limited way, email was first introduced to the public in 1971.

5. Be very careful about the emails you send because they can be retrieved after you have erased them. With e-mail, you can send or receive personal and business-related messages with attachments, such as photos or formatted documents. You can also send music, video clips and software programs.

6. Let's say you have a small business with sales reps working around the country. How do you communicate without running up a huge phone bill? Or what about keeping in touch with far-flung family members? E-mail is the way to go. It's no wonder e-mail has become the most popular service on the Internet. The "subject line" in an email tells the receiver what the message is about.

7. At one time, Internet e-mail was good only for text messages. You couldn't send attachments, such as formatted documents. With the advent of MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension, and other types of encoding schemes, such as UUencode, not only can you send messages electronically, but you can also send formatted documents, photos, audio and video files. Just make sure that the person to whom you send the attachment has the software capable of opening the file.

8. Follow the Trail Just as a letter makes stops at different postal stations along the way to its final destination, e-mail passes from one computer, known as a mail server, to another as it travels over the Internet.

9. Once it arrives at the destination mail server, it's stored in an electronic mailbox until the recipient retrieves it. This whole process can take seconds, allowing you to quickly communicate with people around the world at any time of the day or night.

10. Once you connect to your mail server, you just download your messages to your computer or wireless device. e-mail-based communication is still the most widely used written medium in businesses

11. To send e-mail, you need a connection to the Internet and access to a mail server that forwards your mail. The standard protocol used for sending Internet e-mail is called SMTP, short for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

12. It works in conjunction with POP--Post Office Protocol--servers. Almost all Internet service providers and all major online services offer at least one e-mail address with every account.

13. When you send an e-mail message, your computer routes it to an SMTP server. The server looks at the e-mail address (similar to the address on an envelope), then forwards it to the recipient's mail server, where it's stored until the addressee retrieves it. Remember, you can send e-mail anywhere in the world to anyone who has an e-mail address.

14. Cons Most business professionals today spend between 20% to 50% of their working time using e-mail:[reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’ fragmented information and of course writing e-mail. E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:

15. Use of e-mail is increasing, due to trends of globalization—distribution of organizational divisions, outsourcing, among others. For security reasons, you should change your email password periodically to prevent hackers or spammers from causing your computer to have problems.

16. Spam: E-mail is a push-only medium: control of who receives information lies primarily with the sender. This can lead to an overflow of unwanted or irrelevant information. Receiving too much e-mail (spam) can cause you computer to crash.

17. Spamming and computer viruses The usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by four phenomena: 1) e-mail bombardment 2) spamming 3) phishing 4) e-mail worms. phishing is the criminal act of using a “fake” web site [THAT LOOKS ALMOST IDENTICAL TO A WELL KNOWN SITE.] The dishonest site tries to get information (bank account numbers, social security numbers, etc) for the purpose of stealing identities or bank funds.

18. Spamming is unsolicited commercial e-mail.Because of the very low cost of sending e-mail, spammers can send hundreds of millions of e-mail messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive voluminous unsolicted email each day.

19. E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first e-mail worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system. The combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of e-mail as a practical tool. WORDS TO KNOW!!!!! “replicating—to copy or imatate “vulnerable”–at risk, unprotected

20. Privacy concerns • E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because: • e-mail messages are generally not encrypted; • e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages;

21. the Received: headers and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication. • many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you delete them in your mailbox;

22. E-mail started in 1971 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate.

23. e-mail-based communication is still the most widely used written medium in the businessworld today.

24. A Conversation With The Inventor Of Email Ray Tomlinson gave society one of the greatest communication tools in history. He invented email back in 1971 -- essentially fostering global business communication and turning the Internet into a digital kitchen table for far-flung family members.

25. To extend the addressing to the network, Tomlinson chose the "commercial at" symbol to combine the user and host names, providing the naturally meaningful notation "user@host" that is the standard for email addressing today.

26. T H E E N D !