If you use the internet regularly, at some point or another you will need to get an e-mail account. An email account acts like the mailbox at your home or work. When someone wishes to send you a letter to your home, they need your home address which includes your name, city and country. Similarly, to send e-mail you need to have an e-mail address.
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| Yahoo mail, image via Wikipedia |
In order to get an e-mail address you must first register with a service provider with some basic information. Think of it as choosing a personal post office to handle your mail. There are many choices on the internet and they all have some unique benefits but most of them work in the same fashion. Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL mail, are among the most widely used free e-mail providers.
The registration, or sign-up, process is is generally quick and easy. Your first and last name are required, and some service providers will ask for your home address. Then you get to choose your e-mail address which is written in the following form "your name" @ "your e-mail provider".com. You get to choose the first portion of the e-mail address which is your account name, the part before the @ symbol and it tells your e-mail provider who is sending or reciving the e-mail. The other portion, @ "your e-mail provider".com, will tell other people who is handling your e-mail account.
To give you an example, if my e-mail account is handled by Gmail and I chose "ABC123" as my account name, my e-mail address would be ABC123@gmail.com
Once you've chosen your account name you must now choose a password. It is very important that you choose something which is unique and easy for you to remember but difficult for other to guess. Avoid using names, birthdays, or common words and phrases. It is a good idea to have at least one number, and at least one upper case and lower case letter. If you ever forget your password, then you can reset it by answering questions about the information you submitted when you signed up, so there is no reason for you to choose a weak password.
E-mails are divided into two parts. One portion of the e-mail is called the header, and it stores the e-mail adresses, a subject or brief description abou the e-mail, and the time and date that it was sent. The other part of the e-mail is called the body. The body is the portion which contains your message.
The great thing about e-mails is that you can send the same message to more than one person by writing more than one e-mail address in the header. In the header you have 3 options on how you wish to send your message: To, CC, and BCC.
"To" is where you type the e-mail address of the person to whom you wish to send the message, that really is as simple as it sounds.
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| Sending a message with Gmail |
"Cc" is actually short for carbon copy, and this is where you insert an e-mail address for someone who may want or need to know about the content of the e-mail but is not directly involved in the conversation. Including someone in as a Cc is often a way of updating a person who doesn't need to reply. It isn't necessary to use Cc and depending on your relationship with the recipients, it's inteded use may be ignored.
Sometimes, you wish to send an e-mail to more than one person, but your recipients may not know each other. Although you can put multiple e-mail adresses in the "To" and "Cc" sections your recipients will be able to see all of the e-mail addresses. This raises some issues about privacy, because other people may not want their e-mail address to be public. "Bcc" stands for blind carbon copy, and it solves the privacy issue. When you type e-mail addresses in the Bcc section your recipients will not be able to see the any of the other e-mail addresses.
Last, but certainly not the least, is the attachment option in e-mails. An attachment is any document which you cannot type or copy and paste into the main message or body section. You can send any type of file up to a certain size (depending n what your e-mail provider allows) and the recipient can choose to download the file.
Now that you have an e-mail account wt do you do with it? Well, aside from sending messages to your friends, family, and coworkers, your e-mail account acts as an identification for you on other websites.
When you go online your e-mail account is your phone number, your home address, and your driver's license. It is your primary contact and the last resort if everything else is not working.
You can choose any e-mail service provider you like, although I would recommend choosing one of the four I have listed in this article. I have had an account with each of those companies and currently use Gmail for its simple design yet high levels of security and customization options.
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| Image via Wikipedia |