Computer Electronic Mail - the basics

Introduction:

In order to understand any new body of knowledge - one must begin with a Vocabulary. When trying to teach people about e-mail, I often find that once I have outlined the vocabulary - there isn't much else to teach - that just learning the proper words & prhases and what they mean is often-times all that people need..

ANDHere's the basic - one-sentence-reason that that is true

So - knowing that those things are true - lets define some terms & phrases:

 

An 'aside' about attachments: - when you send a "Microsoft Word" document that is - say - 4 pages long - and has some 'fancy-fonts' and/or some bold-face and other things in it - say a 4 page resume - that file that you send, as an attachment - probably takes-up something between 20,000 and 80,000 bytes. - Now - lets talk about the SAME INFORMATION with no fancy-fonts, bold-face, still 4 pages long in a 'format' called "ASCII-Text" - even if you add Line-Breaks (Microsoft Word "Save As" - option) - then the 4 page file is about 3,000 - 8,000 bytes - yes - that's right - I'm not lying here; the Microsoft file is literally 10 times the size of the same file in ASCII-text format.  

You can prove this to yourself.  Make a document in Word, make the same information in "Note Pad", compare the file-sizes. Microsoft Word Documents take fully 5-10 sometimes even 50 times as much space as does a "NotePad" document - there's something to think about - when you send those Word documents as 'attachments', someone is paying for your network bandwidth - by sending the informtion in ASCII-Text - you save a LOT of transmit time / network bandwidth / cost.

AND - if you've never 'done' an 'attachment' - then here's a brief tutorial on how-to: 'attachment_how_to '

The 'bottom line' in all of this - is that - once you understand that the e-mail system is a conglomeration of different parts & pieces and someone says "My e-mail doesn't work" - you realize that is a pretty useless statemen.  Since there are so many parts & pieces that any ONE of them could be broken but all the others work just fine. One of the things I hope to teach is that you can do some basic troubleshooting on your own - to determine WHERE the problem lies - with which piece of hardware or software... This will make life a LOT easier on those people you rely on to help you SOLVE the problem(s)... - Many of which are simply mis-understandings...

Many, Many, MANY people have & use these 'free e-mail service' opportunities provided them by HotMail, Yahoo, Netscape, amongst others.   However, when you really sit-down-and-think-about-it, what else can you really get 'for free' that is 'worth it'? - In many cases and in many areas of life there is a saying about, "There is no such thing as a 'free lunch'". It's true, here, as well.   For more information, read this little bit about "free e-mail services ".

So - now that we've covered just a 'bit' of the terminology - lets look at some concepts:

1.) to make any e-mail system work (assuming the receiver is in another building / state / country) you will need, - at bare minimum:

2.) HOW does this work?

you compose an e-mail (for now we'll just consider the text, no attachments)

you type-in an address (perhaps from a business card you got, or from a magazine article (remember, now, your computer has NO IDEA where this person gets his/her e-mail)

you press "Send" - and 'off it goes' - - (YEAH - if you're lucky!)

here's just a 'few' of the steps that happen (note I'm leaving out a LOT of steps!)

Return-trip... - assuming Sammy got your e-mail and assuming Sammy thinks enough of you to reply to it?!

Here's a graphic to help you vizualize what happens...

E-mail basics diagram

last updated: Wednesday_24_April_2002; nsc6.2; revID: 1d