Email

Email, quick for “electronic mail,” is without doubt one of the most generally used options of the Internet, together with the online. It lets you ship and obtain messages to and from anybody with an e-mail deal with, wherever on the earth.

Email makes use of a number of protocols throughout the TCP/IP suite. For instance, SMTP is used to ship messages, whereas the POP or IMAP protocols are used to retrieve messages from a mail server. When you configure an e-mail account, you could outline your e-mail deal with, password, and the mail servers used to ship and obtain messages. Fortunately, most webmail providers configure your account routinely, so that you solely have to enter your e-mail deal with and password. However, should you use an e-mail shopper like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, you might have to manually configure every account. Besides the e-mail deal with and password, you may additionally need to enter the incoming and outgoing mail servers and enter the proper port numbers for each.

The authentic e-mail customary solely supported plain textual content messages. Eventually, e-mail advanced to assist wealthy textual content with customized formatting. Today, e-mail helps HTML, which permits emails to be formatted the identical means as web sites. HTML e-mail messages can embody images, hyperlinks, and CSS layouts. You may ship information or “email attachments” together with messages. Most mail servers can help you ship a number of attachments with every message, however they restrict the full measurement. In the early days of e-mail, attachments have been usually restricted to at least one megabyte, however now many mail servers assist e-mail attachments which might be 20 megabytes in measurement or more.

Email Netiquette

When composing an e-mail message, it is very important use good netiquette. For instance, it’s best to at all times embody a topic that summarizes the subject of the e-mail. It can also be useful to start every message with the recipient’s identify and finish the message together with your identify or “signature.” A typical signature contains your identify, e-mail deal with, and/or web site URL. Knowledgeable signature could embody your organization identify and title as effectively. Most e-mail packages can help you save a number of signatures, which you’ll insert on the backside of an e-mail.

If you need to ship an e-mail to a number of recipients, you possibly can merely add every e-mail deal with to the “To” discipline. However, if the e-mail is primarily meant for one particular person, it’s best to place the extra addresses within the “CC” (carbon copy) discipline. If you might be sending an e-mail to a number of individuals that do not know one another, it’s best to make use of the “Bcc” (blind carbon copy) discipline. This hides the e-mail addresses of every recipient, which helps stop spam.

NOTE: Email was initially written “e-mail,” however is now more generally written as “email” with out the sprint.