What is an Email?
Email stands for Electronic Mail. It is a method to send messages from one
computer to another computer through the Internet.
It is mostly used in business, education, technical communication, and
document interactions.
History of Email
The age of email services is older than ARPANET and the Internet.
The early emails were only sent to the same computer.
Email services were started in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson.
He first developed a system to send mail between users on different hosts
across the ARPANET, using @ sign with the destination server, and was
recognized as email.
Advantages of Email Services
1- Easy and Fast:
Composing an email is very simple and one of the fast ways to communicate. We can send an
email within a minute just by clicking the mouse.
2- Secure:
Email services are a secure and reliable method to receive and send information. The feature of
spam provides more security because a user can easily eliminate malicious content.
3- Mass Sending:
We can easily send a message to many people at a time through email.
4- Multimedia Email:
Email offers to send multimedia, documents, images, audio files, videos, and various types of
files. We can easily attach the types of files in the original format or compressed format.
Disadvantages of Email Services
1- Malicious Use:
Anyone can send an email just by knowing their email address. The attachment feature
of the email be the major disadvantage of it, hackers can send viruses through email
because sometimes the spam feature unable to classify suspicious emails.
2- Spam:
To improve this feature sometimes some important email is transferred into spam without
any notification.
3- Time-Consuming:
Responding through email takes more time rather than other message services like
WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
(Email is good for professional discussion but not good for casual chatting. )
How does Email Work?
Email travels via the Internet from one computer to
another.
Computers known as mail servers direct outgoing mail
and store incoming the mail.
Once email reaches your mail server, it waits in an
electronic mail box, the "Inbox” for you to collect it.
Two Ways to Get Email
1. Provided by your Internet Service Provider
Monthly fee for internet connection often includes email service.
Aliant - ...@sympatico.ca
Eastlink - …@eastlink.ca
2. Free Web-Based Service Providers
Advertising on the site pays for the service.
Gmail - …@gmail.com
Hotmail - …@hotmail.com
Two Ways People Check Email
1. Web-Based Email
Login to a web site
Messages stay on the mail server
Can be accessed from any computer with internet connection
2. Using Email Software
Open and login to your email software application (e.g. Outlook)
The application retrieves your messages from the mail server and saves them to
your computer’s hard drive
What is an Email Address?
An email address is the identification of an electronic mailbox.
It has two parts, namely-
1- A local part and
2- The domain.
The topmost popular email providers are:
G-mail
Yahoo Mail
Microsoft Outlook
iCloud , etc
