A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/guides/help/email.hlb

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 3.4 KB | 75 lines

Electronic Mail on the Internet.

    A great strength of the Internet is it's email system.  You
can send messages anywhere in the world, with no surcharges, and email
usually can travel the circumference of the planet in less time than
it takes to address a paper envelope.

E-Mail addresses:

    Every person on the internet has one or more email addresses.

An example:    [e-mail]
         name__^     ^      ^     ^____ domain (com - company, edu - education
                   machine name            org - organization, gov -government
                       uk - britian, de - germany, etc)

    The "@" is necessary, it seperates the name of the person from
the name of the computer that they are on.  If you are trying to find
the email address of someone, there are facilities inside gopher to
help you.  The internet, unfortunately, does not have anything which
remotely resembles a central phone book.  If you cannot find their
email address, you usually have to resort to calling them on the
phone, and asking.

    Your email address is your login name followed by
"@execpc.com", which is a synonym for "@earth.execpc.com", the computer
you're currently using.  Note also, that email addresses never have a
period at the end.

    We offer two popular comprehensive email programs, elm and
pine.  We encourage you to not mix and match mail readers, as these
two programs like to store your mail in two different places, and also
treat mail slightly differently.  Elm is a elegant, unobtrusive mail
program, and Pine is more newuser-oriented.  We feel both programs are
quite easy to use.

Elm:

    When you run elm, you're presented with a list of mail
currently in your mailbox, if you have any.  There are several lines
of help on the bottom.  You can "m" to mail a message, "r" to reply to
a message, "s" to save a message in a folder, and do many other
things.  Help is only a "?"-key away.  When you mail a message, just
fill in who it's two, and who to send carbon copies to, if anyone
(otherwise, just press return).  You'll then be dropped into your
default editor, where you can type up the message.  When you're done,
save the message, and elm will prompt you whether you wish to send it,
or forget it.

Pine:

    Pine is a folder-oriented mailer.  When you run pine, you are
presented with a menu.  "C" lets you compse a message to mail off, you
just fill in the blanks on who the message is to, who carbon-copies go
to, the subject, and any file you want to attach.  If you don't want
to cc: the message, just leave that field blank, the same goes for the
attachment field.  Then, just type in the email message, and press
control-X when you are finished.  From pine's main menu, you can also
access the folder index, which is where your incoming mail resides, or
the folder list, where mail you've saved away is kept, the address
book, wehre you can create aliases for all your friends.  Say you have
a friend, and their email address is "[e-mail]".
Well, you send him a lot of mail, and you're sick of typing in that
whole address, you can just alias it to "prez", and from then on, when
you Compose a message, just type in "prez", and it'll get to him.


    The third option for mailing is to use "S" to send a message.
This is the quick-and-dirty mail system.  Just fill in who it's to,
the subject, and type in the message.  Remember to press return at the
end of each line, and that typing a "." on a line will finish the
message.