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"Email - The New Frontier Has Been Paved"
Mike Geronimo Lanier
Webmaster
The Internet can sometimes be overwhelming. Everyone is on it, everyone uses it. The Internet can be like speaking a foreign language. Once you
know how to say hello, good-bye, and where's the restroom, you have tackled the hard stuff. The rest we can lookup in the book.
People talk a lot about the digital divide. What is not realized is that the divide exists not only across racial lines but exists across class,
gender, age, education and geography.
New technology springs into our lives as a fad. Once the hype dies down, the true utility of the new technology takes hold. With the Internet,
email by far is used the most. Most everyone has an email address. You either have an email address from work, your Internet Service Provider gave you one or you signed up with a free email service on
the web.
To understand email you must first understand that it is different from the world wide web. The web is like a vast library that everyone has access
to and every book you look at can give you a direct connection to other books anywhere in the library. Email is like our phone system. You can have several phones and individual numbers for each. You
have a phone at work with one number. You have a phone at home with another number. You can have several numbers ring at one phone. You can even have multiple phones with the same number. This applies to
email as well.
Like a phone number, if you dial any of the numbers incorrectly the call will not go through. The system needs all of the numbers in the correct
order to complete the call. Email is the same way. Leave out one letter in the email address and your email will not be sent. There are no spaces in email addresses. You can however have any mixture of
capitalization in the email address without affecting the delivery of your email. Any variation of capitalization of an email address will work. Both of these will work – joe.smith@sys.company.net or Joe.Smith@Sys.Company.net.
All email addresses have the same components (name@provider.ext). Let's start from the far right. The
ext is like your zip code. It is the first thing that tells the Internet computers where to send your email. The ext is usually com, but can be
net, org, edu, gov, biz, us, co, etc.. The next part of your email address is your provider. The provider
is the proper name of the company that is providing you with the email service. This can be aol, earthlink, bellsouth, yahoo, abc.network, etc.. That last one is not a mistake. The "." in any of these names is like an extension in an office phone number. Depending on
how big or convoluted the organization is, they may have several layers to their email address. The abc.network depicts a company that has elected to breakdown there address into sub-sections. Don't let this confuse you. The
@ in the email address separates your personal identifier from the system that is providing the email address. The name
portion of the email address is your personal identifier. This tells the email system provider who you are and routes your email to your account. The name
can be any unique combination of letters, numbers and some punctuation marks. The name
has to be unique for that system only. You can have the same name from different providers, just like you have the same local phone numbers with different area codes.
Most people have two email addresses, one at work and one at home. Regardless of how many email addresses you have, you have to check your account
to send and receive email. There are basically two ways to do this. You can use an email client on your computer or you can use your browser on the web to do this.
An email client is a special program on your computer that is used for email. The most popular programs are Outlook, Eudora, and Notes
. These programs allow you to setup multiple email accounts, filter and categorize your email and archive and manage email that is sent or received. You can also have these programs indicate to the email
service how long to store email on the system after it has been read. Just because you have downloaded and read the email with your email client it does not mean it has been deleted from the email
server. You must tell the system to do this.
The upside to using an email client on your computer is that you can manage several email accounts at one time. With one click of the mouse you can
check multiple email accounts. This is important if you are a busy professional that has multiple email accounts. Another advantage to using an email client on a computer is that once you download your
email, you have a permanent record of it on your computer. You can then archive it with the rest of your data and refer to it months or years later if need be. The down side to the email client is that
the programs are not the easiest things to learn and if you are away from your computer, you do not have access to your sent messages, the messages in your archive or your address book.
The other method to access your email account is via the web. You need to use your browser to connect to a website that allows you to login to your
email account. From within the browser you are able to send, receive and manage your email. If you elect to use the web to send and receive email, you can access your email from any computer that is
attached to the Internet. This is a great advantage. The down side to this is security. Most cyber cafes and library computers have safe guards running to not allow your passwords from being stolen.
However if you elect to use a computer at a friends home or a computer at work, you may be vulnerable. The upside to web based email is the ease of use. It is usually pretty simple to login and check and
send email.
Make sure to archive or print out the emails that are most important to you. All email accounts have a limited amount of space to store messages.
If someone sends you a large attachment to you via email like a song or picture, this can eat up all of your allotted space. You can set the controls on some accounts to limit the size of attachments.
Some helpful websites are:
Helpful technology hints for seniors
Free service to access any email account via the web
If you have any specific questions, feel free to email the Webmaster - Mike Geronimo Lanier at webmaster@etigerteam.com
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