Advantages of email and the way it works today

How popular is email and what are its advantages?

At every major computer gadget show around the world, people are always looking for what they call the "killer app" or "killer application" - that device, gadget, gizmo or program that will revolutionize the world. An International Data Corporation study in 2000 estimated that worldwide, ten billion pieces of email are sent daily. That figure should grow to thirty-five billion a day by 2005. Now that is a killer app. The power of electronic mail, or email, becomes abundantly clear when you see a grandmother get an email from her grandchild, or a man getting an email from the woman he loves. Email is the tool that reunites families. Of course, it can also be used in a negative way.

Email is time efficient, easy to use, and for many people, it is a money saver, eliminating long distance phone calls and costly express delivery charges. It negates the time delays of what computer geeks lovingly call "snail mail" - the postal service. Hands-down, email has become the most popular tool used on the Internet.

Email has the immediacy of a phone call, the permanency of a letter, and a style all its own. You can send an email to one person or 100 just as easily - and you can send it at your convenience and the recipient can enjoy it at their pleasure. It is an informal, immediate way to communicate. People tend to be less formal about what they write and how they write it, but there are established do's and don'ts in communicating online. Here are a few basic rules:

Remember who you are talking to and that it is a public experience - you never know whose eyes will see it along the way once it has been sent.
Do not forget that what you say can come back to haunt you - emails are often saved on hard drives and servers around the world, and can easily be forwarded.
Similarly, remember that when you send information to people, you are taking their time and bandwidth. Do not overwhelm people with too many emails, respect people's privacy, and do not abuse the power of having a forum to talk to people.

How does email work?

Email, in its simplest form, is an electronic message sent from one computer to another. With the latest technology not only can you email people photos, music and other attachments, you can even send video emails. Just as website information is passed in packets from one computer to another, email works the same way, going from a mail server to another as it travels over the Internet. When it arrives at the destination mail server, it is stored in an electronic mailbox until the recipient retrieves it. The process can take seconds, usually longer, depending on the connections between all the servers involved. What makes it so useful is that you can open it and answer it on your schedule. So, unlike a phone call, you can fit it in whenever it is convenient for you.

To have email, you must have an account on a mail server. It is like having a street address for receiving letters. To send email you need a connection to the Internet and access to a mail server that either has your mail or can forward your mail. The standard protocol used for Internet email is an SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It works along with another protocol, POP or Post Office Protocol. When you email something, your computer routes it to an SMTP server, which looks at the email address and then forwards it to the recipient's mail server. Then you either retrieve your mail from the server, or read it on that server.

Just like you can dissect a URL to learn more about its origins, you can gain a few clues from an email address. The user name usually comes before the @ sign. After that sign comes the domain name of the mail server. For example: alan@deadlineonline. com. We can reasonably deduce that Alan is the recipient and deadlineonline. com is the domain name. Keep in mind there are a lot of strange user names out there, but studying the pattern of an email name will help you figure out how to send email to other people at the same place. For example, if you know that Bob Smith's email address at Company XYZ is bsmith@companyxyz . com, it is likely that Sue Barker's email address at the same company is sbarker@companyxyz. com. It is not foolproof, but it might produce the right guess in a pinch

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