- WHAT IS EMAIL?
What is it good for?
-
- Most people who use email wonder how they ever managed without it.
So whats all the fuss about?
- Email is like ordinary postal mail in that you can write words and
send it to people, but unlike 'snail' mail, it gets there in seconds
or minutes, not days or weeks.
Its cheaper than snail mail, and is especially good for short notes
that you probably wouldnt send if you first had to go to the trouble
of finding a stamp, and an envelope and walking all the way to a post
box. Instead emails can be sent right from your home or work if there
is a computer there. Because it is just as easy to send emails across
the road as it is to send to England or China, email is a great way
to stay in touch with relatives overseas. It's also just as easy to
send an email to one person as it is to send it to a group of people.
In this way its a very convenient way of organising things.
Whats it not good for?-
Email is no good for sending things like chocolates or lego. Email is
also not very good at conveying personal matters because there is no
tone of voice or body language. Ordinary letters also suffer from this,
but we tend to write and send emails so quickly, in just a minute or
2, that sometimes we leave bits out by mistake, and the things we write
can be misunderstood.
Email addresses- Emails
are addressed in the same way letters are. Each address is unique and
identifys the intended recipient clearly. Here is an email address:
johndoe@ranui.org.nz
- The .nz bit just means it goes to a NewZealand
based domain. The .org bit means the domain
is a not profit organisation (this can also be .co
for company or .school for schools etc)
The johndoe bit is the person at that organisation that we want to send
the email. So roughly we have the person @
the organisation. The organsaition need not be a particular place--for
instance Telecom's xtra.co.nz covers all
of NZ.
Ok, compared to a street address its pretty short. But theres a catch--there
can only ever be one johndoe at ranui.org.nz If another one comes along
he will just have to be johndoe2 of jdoe
or johnd. In most cases johndoe and JohnDoe
and JOHNDOE will all go to the same person. Its a bit like choosing
your own telephone number with words in it.
-
Where can
i get it?
- There
are two kinds of email. The first kind and the one most dealt with at
CLIC IT! is webmail. Webmail is where email is sent and received via
a website. Once this kind of email is setup you can send or receive
email from anywhere in the world, anywhere there is a computer with
an internet connection. For this reason it is very popular with travellers.
Webmail is usually free to set up an account, and some people may have
several such accounts. Here are a couple of places to get a webmail
account:
Hotmail (www.hotmail.com)
-- has been very popular but getting more difficult to use, with lots
of advertising
Yahoo (mail.yahoo.com) --a
bit similar
Webmail.net (www.webmail.net.nz)
--worth a try
Lycos (login.mail.lycos.com)
--ditto
and of course our very own Ranui Webmail (www.ranui.org.nz/mail)
The disadvantage of webmail is that you have to both write and read
your email while connected to the internet. At say an internet cafe
or library, that can add up at $6 /hour.
The other kind of email is the kind you access via a dial up account.
This kind of email comes included with any dial up internet account,
like Xtra for example. Software on your computer dials up the internet
service provider (ISP)'s computer and asks to download your email, where
you can read it offline. You can take your time to write your emails
and only dial up when ready to send them. This kind of account costs
around $10-20 per month.
Page 2 is about how to send an email: Email
basics
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