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BOOT CAMP 159 (25/01/01)
E-mail – the basics part 1
It's all very well for us to prattle on week after week about
all the clever things you can do with electronic mail or 'e-mail' but for a very
large number of people the whole idea of sending words and pictures anywhere in
the world, over ordinary telephone lines, remains a daunting mystery. For the
next couple of weeks it's back to basics, with a hopefully painless, plain
English introduction to email.
It's not as complicated as some people like to make out, you
don't need to understand the technicalities, nor do you need to be able to type
or know how to work a computer in order to use email (though both can make life
easier).
So what can it do for you? Email has very many uses, but one
of the most practical applications, and the one that has caught most people's
imagination is the facility to keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues
anywhere in the world, at very little cost and messages are delivered to the
recipient's 'mailbox' more or less instantaneously, (though like any mail
system, or fax, there's no guarantee they will be read straight away).
Most email messages are in the form of text but they can be
accompanied by pictures, diagrams any kind of visual image in fact, including
movie clips. You can even send sounds and there's two-way videophone facility
but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Most users confine themselves to sending
or receiving text messages and the occasional family photograph, and that's the
side of email we'll be focussing on this week. Suffice it to say that email has
changed the lives of millions of people around the world; it's fast, cheap,
effective, and easy to use and once you've got the hang of it, it can be a lot
of fun!
The mechanics of email cause a certain amount of confusion,
so we'll take a moment to look at how a simple text messages gets from one place
to another. Basically there are four key elements to email. At both ends of the
chain there are the 'terminals', the devices in your home or office on which
messages are written, sent and received – more about those in a moment.
Terminals are connected – usually by an ordinary telephone line – to powerful
'server' computers and these act as gateways or portals to the third component,
the Internet, which is the infrastructure of computers and high-speed data links
that connect the server computers all around the world to one another.
The fourth element is an account with an Internet Service
Provider or ISP, which you must have in order to send and receive email. ISPs
are the companies that operate the server computers and an ISP account will
provide you with an email addresses, rather like a telephone number except that
it's usually made up of letters that identifies you and your server.
Incidentally, having an account will give you access to the Internet but there's
no obligation to have anything to do with it if you don't want to, the Internet
is merely a means of transporting messages. Server computers are where email
messages that are sent to you are stored, in electronic 'mailboxes'. Messages
remain in your personal mailbox until you log on to the server and download the
contents into your terminal, so they can be read.
Until recently an email terminal meant a PC but in the last
couple of years a bewildering number of gadgets have appeared that can also send
and receive email. Some of them are quite good and appear to be very cheap or
convenient but there are a few points to bear in mind. Firstly, email devices
and systems that plug into or use domestic TVs (Internet boxes, digital TV,
cable TV services etc.) are not usually very good at displaying computer text or
graphics and messages can be hard to read.
Second, many non-PC devices (mobile phones, email phones
etc.) are unable to display pictures or graphics and can only be used to send
and receive plain text. Third, most of them have limited or no internal storage
capacity for messages and may not be able to print them out or. Fourth, the
keyboards on some devices are often small badly designed and difficult to use,
and lastly, you will normally have no choice over which service provider you
use, which can be expensive and inconvenient.
In short, if you want to use email I strongly recommend that
you get a computer. It doesn't have to be the latest or most powerful model, in
fact almost any Windows PC or Apple Mac made within the past five years, capable
of connecting to the Internet will do. If you shop around you can pick up
discontinued and end of range Windows PCs, with all the trimmings, for as little
as £250. True you will have a slightly steeper learning curve -- compared with
some of the simpler email devices -- but these days the operating software is
quite user-friendly and you really don't need to know much about PCs just to use
email.
Hopefully a friend or relative will be able guide you through
the basics of buying a PC and choosing an ISP and in most areas there are
beginners courses and clubs where you will find lots of friendly help and
support – check at your local library – and remember age is not a barrier.
So-called 'silver surfers' now make up a very significant proportion of email
and Internet users. You may be surprised how quickly you can pick it up, and you
will discover that a PC can do a great many useful things besides sending and
receiving email.
Next week – E-mail, part 2
JARGON FILTER
INTERNAL STORAGE
Many non-PC email devices cannot store email messages as they
have limited memory capacity, instead messages are kept on the server computer,
though there may be a limit on the number of messages, and the space that they
occupy and in some cases old messages will be deleted to make way for new
ones.
MAILBOX
Storage space on a server computer where your incoming
messages are kept
MOVIE CLIPS
Short low-resolution video sequences can be 'attached' to an
email message, however the image is generally small jerky and of relatively poor
quality
TOP TIP
Here's a tip for those already familiar with email. If you
receive a lot of messages on the same topic, or from the same sender, maybe you
print out a lot of emails then there is a very convenient but little known
feature in Outlook Express that allows you to combine messages into one
document, for reading or printing. Open the mailbox containing the messages you
want to combine and highlight them by hold down the Ctrl key and clicking on
each one in turn. Now go to the Messsage menu and select Combine and Decode. You
will be asked if you want to change the order of the messages, if not click OK
and the new combined document will be created, use SaveAs on the file menu to
save it as a new document.
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