E-mailImagine being able to send a letter to someone, anywhere in the world, that included

E-mail

Imagine being able to send a letter to someone, anywhere in the world, that included pictures and sounds as well as written words, and not even have to put a stamp on it. With e-mail you can do just that. E-mail allows you to send messages quickly and easily to other people using computers rather than the postal service. To the Internet user, the ordinary post is known as "snail mail" because it is so much slower than e-mail, which can deliver its message to the other side of the world in seconds.

In some ways, e-mail is like a cross between a letter and a telephone call. You type a note or a letter on your screen and then you send it down the telephone line to another person for as little as it costs you to call your service provider. Whether your message is going to Calgary in Canada or to Copenhagen in Denmark, it will cost the same. You can even attach a file from your computer, whether it be a sound, an image or a text, to your e-mail message.

E-mail addresses are made up of two distinct parts, separated by the "@" sign. The first part of the address identifies the specific user. Many people use their names, or their initials or a nickname. After the @ sign comes the host address or node name, which is the actual place where the user's electronic mailbox is situated. Here is an example. My e-mail address is "november@dircon.co.uk." I picked "November" because that was the month in which I was born, and "dircon" is the Direct Connection, my service provider, a commercial company based in the UK. Easy, isn't it？

When a new user joins the Internet for the first time, he or she will get an e-mail address that allows the user both to send and receive messages. Just as you need to put the correct address on an envelope to make sure it gets to the right place, so you must also put the correct e- mail address on your electronic correspondence. Computers are not so understanding as postmen and women, who can sometimes work out where a wrongly addressed letter is meant to go. If you make a slight mistake with your address, your message will simply be bounced right back to you.

How do you find out what someone's e-mail address is？ Naturally, the easiest and best way is simply to ask them. Because there is no one in charge of the whole Internet and because it is expanding so rapidly, there is no complete record anywhere of everyone who is connected.

When someone sends you a message via e-mail, it will be stored on the computer at your service provider, or if your school has its own connection to the Internet, on the main server. Once you have logged on to the Net you can launch your e-mail program. Eudora is one of the most popular and easy-to-use programs and is available for both Macintosh and IBM compatibles. There is a version that you can download from the Internet. Many programs will automatically search for new messages when they are first launched.

E-mail has obvious advantages for schools and businesses that want to keep track of their messages. For example, it allows you to quote all or part of the message you are replying to, without having to type it all out again. The handy thing about this feature is that if you are answering questions, you can keep them in your reply. This saves the other person having to refer back to the original documents when he or she gets your reply.

Another thing e-mail allows you to do is to forward a message on to someone else. If someone sends you a piece of information that you feel would be of interest to another person, you can send a copy of the message to him.

Again this is invaluable for large organizations that might have offices all over the world. For example, someone in the London office might send a query or a new idea to someone else in New York in the United States. He, realizing that this is something that another person in Sydney in Austr

A．Y

B．N

C．NG