Internet 101: Email

From FutureNet : .net 1, Dec '94 - Easy Internet Written by Davey Winder

The post office of the future

E-mail is almost certainly the most widely used application on the Internet, and unsurprisingly so. Rather than sending your letters by traditional means (in other words, via `snail mail'), you send them via computer. The advantages are numerous, the most obvious being speed. One of my e-mail letters can arrive at its destination on the other side of the planeT within seconds of me hitting the Return key on my keyboard. Yes, it really is that quick.

There are other advantages, besides raw speed, too. How about the fact that an e-mail message isn't restricted to just text? You can send sound, images, video - even computer software. Something known as MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions) makes this flexibility possible. E-mail is also a lot cheaper than its traditional counterpart (it costs the same to send a message to Tokyo as it does to Tottenham, for example).

E-mail has its disadvantages, of course. You can't send something physically or to someone without an e-mail facility, and you can`t send anything `nice' (e-mail birthday cards are never going to replace the paper variety, for instance). But as an extra way of sending detailed messages to complement the telephone and `snail mail' it's brilliant. You'll soon wonder how you lived without it.

E-mail is also a lot cheaper than traditional 'snail mail' (it costs the same to send a message to Tokyo as it does to Tottenham, for instance).

E-mail addresses can seem complex at first glance, but they really are quite straightforward and logical once you look at them more carefully. You'll hear the term `host' mentioned a lot, for starters. This is basically a machine - a single computer or a whole network - that's connected to the Internet. Hosts are also referred to as `sites,' and form part of a domain. There, that's that out of the way.

Let's dissect one of my e-mail addresses and see how it works. An e-mail address serves a similar purpose to an address on an envelope - the electronic postman needs to know where to send the letter and to whom it's intended. Just as I might get a letter addressed to Davey Winder, 1a Cyborg Crescent, Internet City, UK (well, I might if such a place existed), so e-mailed information also needs to be carried by your e-mail address.

In dwindera@cix.compulink.co.uk, for example, everything to the right of the @ symbol relates to the domain, or the actual computer where my account is held (if you prefer), while anything to the left of the @ symbol relates to the user at that address. Reading the domain from right to left, then, you get uk.co.compulink.cix which indicates that my domain is in the United Kingdom, is a commercial concern, and is actually mediated by the CompuLink Information Exchange. You often see other codes in an address, which relate to either the country of origin (easy to spot) or type of organisation (not so easy, unless you know what to look for). Here's a quick guide to some of them:

   com          commercial organisation
   edu          educational facility
   gov          non-military government body
   mil          military concern
   org          other organisation
   net          network resource

Something that newcomers to the Net (and a few old-timers as well, for that matter) tend to find confusing are e-mail headers. A header contains lots of information about the e-mail message, including the route it's taken to reach you. While most e-mail packages let you hide these headers (in fact, most default to this setting), it can be useful to see them - especially if something's gone wrong with delivery of the mail.

In the real world, if a letter fails to get delivered it usually appears back through your letterbox with some writing on it from the post office telling you why it didn't make it (address unknown or whatever). Well, the same thing happens with e-mail. If your message `bounces,' as it's known, it gets returned to your mailbox. The header then contains useful information as to where it went and how far it got. This can be vital if you want to track down where and why things have gone wrong. Locate the fault and you can easily rectify matters.

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