1 Introduction

E-Mail, or electronic mail, is just mail sent between users electronically. E-Mail is the most productive, resource available on the Internet. The abililty to send messages electronically (and very quickly) has made "the world smaller".

The essential part of email is your address. Due to the nature of the Internet, the way it has grown and developed, with no one group or government regulating ot coordinating it, no centralised records have been kept or individual email addresses.

At the moment, therefore, there are no "white pages" for the internet where you can (easily) lookup other peoples email addresses. The best way is to phone up and ask your collegues what their email addresses is!

1.1 E-Mail Address

So, how do you understand your address?

You normally have a userid (your login name) and the domainname of the computer to which you connect to gain access to the Internet (which is separated by a @ symbol.

An example: If you were connecting to Netcom their domainname would be something like netcomuk.co.uk so, if you add your userid (loginname) to this domain your email address would look like:

loginname@netcomuk.co.uk

If you conneted to Enterprise their domainname is enterprise.net so, adding your userid (loginname) to this would result in your email address:

loginname@enterprise.net

If you are connected to someone like Demon Internet you may have a slightly different looking email address (just to make things more complicated!). Demon's domainname is demon.co.uk but your userid (loginname) goes between the @ sign and the domainname:

anything@loginname.demon.co.uk

In this example you can put anything where "anything" is! Demon offer you multiple email accounts by allowing you to put any mailbox before the @ sign! We have various accounts, for example:

sales@netconnect.demon.co.uk

support@netconnect.demon.co.uk

chris@netconnect.demon.co.uk

E-Mail addresses do differ within other countries. Usually it is the high-level domain that alters (the part which says which country the user lives). Here is a list of high-level domains for some countries.

uk	United Kingdom
ie	Ireland
de	Germany
nl	The Netherlands
fr	France
no	Norway
se	Sweden
it	Italy
be	Belgium
au	Australia
jp	Japan
ru	Russia
za	South Africa
fi	Finland
ca	Canada

There are three domains which apply "anywhere" in the world:

com	Commercial organisation such as a company
net	Network such as an Internet Service Provider
org	non-profit making organisation like a charity

COM, NET and ORG really do not tell you where the recipient is based. ie. if you wanted to send a mail to loginname@company.net you wouldn't know where that company was situated (whereas if it had a .de or .it high-level domain you would know that the company was is Germany or Italy).

1.2 How Does E-Mail Work?

It is actually quite similar to the way the postal service works!

If, for example, I sent a letter from Darlington to London the post office would take my letter with all the other letters to London, taken to a sorting office and sorted for that area then delivered to its destination. The destination could be a mailbox which holds the mail until the receiver has time to collect his/her mail (ie. many companies use PO Boxes to store mail which can then be collated at specific and suitable times more than once a day in most cases).

The process for email is very similar. I create an email here in Darlington, which is destined for a person working in a company in Berlin (Germany). The mail is sent (by me) to my ISP (similar to posting a normal letter in the post box) who then "sorts" the mail and directs it to the correct country where it arrives at its destination. Usually this could be a company who then sorts the mail for each employee.

ie. stefan@company.de

The .de denotes that the mail is destined for Germany (de stands for Deutschland), the company part tells the sorter of the mail that it is destined for a company within Germany. Finally, the name stefan is most likely an employee working for the company with his own mailbox.

1.3 How Useful is E-Mail?

It is very useful. It is much cheaper and easier to send certain information via email than it is to send bu facsimile or normal post.

If, for example, you wanted to send the same fax to 15 people Internationally, this would be expensive and time consuming.

The same process could be done by email much more quickly and cheaply. To create a mail to be sent to "multiple" recipients is just a matter of putting all their email addresses in the to: section when you create an email. The best thing about this is that you only need to send it once!

Another good example is for a person who wants to send a picture, sound sample or some data to another person (or even persons).

You could send a disk by express air mail but this is very expensive and will still take 2 or more days. E-Mail allows you to attach data (such as files) to your mail messages!! The recipient would receive this within minutes and can decode the information immediately.

TIP: the term "Snail Mail" is a derogatory term used by Internet users to refer to ordinary mail, which is very very slow when compared to electronic mail.

1.4 What is Netiquette?

Netiquette is just a collection of do's and don'ts when you are connected to the Internet. Mainly directed towards E-Mail and newsgroup users it is really a tradition or, some would say, culture that has been developed on the Internet.

One of the problems with electronic mail is that it is difficult to express sarcasm, humour, sadness, dissapointment so that the receiver fully understands what you are trying to say. Indeed on occassions many receivers can view what you have said in completely the wrong context. Say something sarcastic and the receiver may think you are waging a personal attack!

Generally, between friends, email mis-understandings are easily recognised as you begin to understand the other persons humour and style of writing. Newsgroups are much different: you are sending a message to, potentially, 1000's of receivers who will all view your message in a different way. These people will then flame you by sending a nasty response in return. You can easily start getting a name for yourself and (in extreme circumstances) be banned/warned off certain newsgroups.

Some things you should try and avoid when sending an email or message to a newsgroup:

• Shouting - if you WRITE LIKE THIS you may think you are trying to emphasize your words/comments but, on the Internet, it is classed as shouting! Avoid using capitals within sentances.

• Signatures - you are best cutting down your signature to a maximum of 4 or 5 lines. Many "old-hat" (users connected for a few years) Internet users cannot stand the glorification of signatures. Some people even have huge ASCII art as their signatures that can take anything upto 15 lines. This will not be tolerated by most users.

• Flaming - if you disagree strongly (mainly on a newsgroup) or launch a personal attack against another user you may be flamed. If you are flamed it will involved many people writing to you (in person or in public!) to tell you that you are wrong to say what you said and that they strongly disagree with your comments.

  If you are flamed you stand the chance of being banned or warned from using a newsgroup, IRC channel etc.

• Cultures - remember that most discussion groups contain users from all over the world. What you think may be interesting (or even the "norm") may be totally unacceptable to another user (from another country). Therefore, be careful before you respond to messages.
• Threads - many newsreaders put news messages into threads which means that if you respond to a message it connects (like a tree) to the previous message regarding the topic. Therefore if you are following up a news message keep the content of your message in the same topic as the subject.

• Crossposting - if you create a news message, do not (if possible) crosspost the same message to multiple, but similar, newsgroups. If you feel that you have to crosspost, make sure you put an apology into the message and that you don't do it too often.

• !!! or "....." - do not use lots of exclamation marks at the end of sentances in order to tell a user you are shocked, suprised etc!!!!! Also, do not use lots of "...." to break up sentances. Some people.....for example....use these dots to break sentances...and words...but who knows why....?

• Bold - avoid using lots of bold or highlighted text if possible. This is particularly true within IRC channels where some people are quite offended by the use of lots of bold and highlighted text.

• Repeat Mail - if possible try not to repeat sending a mail to a newsgroup. True, many newsgroups are very busy and some people may not see your message! By sending your message 2 or 3 times, however, you will make the newsgroup even busier. You also stand a good chance of making many people annoyed.

• Commerical Posts - if you run a company avoid posting blatent commercial messages to a discussion newsgroup. By all means tell people you like a product (as you will always find people who write back and tell you they disagree) but do not announce products unless you think people will benefit from the announcement - ie. if you have released a new patch which fixes bugs etc.

• Quoting - avoid quoting reams and reams of text if someone sends you a long email. Just keep the basic facts or your returned mail will seem to last forever.

  Most newsgroup readers work by using threads so a person reading your mail can easily refer to the previous message if they need to.

An electronic mail message has a specific structure to it that's common across every type of computer system.(4) A sample would be:

Received: from ajk.tele.fi ([131.177.5.20]) by relay-9.mail.demon.net
           id aa912139; 1 Feb 97 14:10 GMT
Message-Id: <9702011411.AA11723@ajk.tele.fi>
Date: Sat, 1 Feb 1997 16:12:21 +0200
From: Tomi Ollila 
Reply-To: 
To: enquiries@active2.demon.co.uk
Cc: amitcp-group@nsdi.fi
Subject: NC Demo

Hi Chris,

I'm just testing latest demo.

I believe some of these things is thought by you too, So I just make sure
you have taken these into consideration :)

The `Date:' header contains the date and time the message was sent. Likewise, the "good" address (as opposed to "real" address) is laid out in the `From:' header. Sometimes it won't include the full name of the person (in this case `The President'), and may look different, but it should always contain an email address of some form.

The `Message-ID:' of a message is intended mainly for tracing mail routing, and is rarely of interest to normal users. Every `Message-ID:' is guaranteed to be unique.

`To:' lists the email address (or addresses) of the recipients of the message. There may be a `Cc:' header, listing additional addresses. Finally, a brief subject for the message goes in the `Subject:' header.

The exact order of a message's headers may vary from system to system, but it will always include these fundamental headers that are vital to proper delivery.

1.6 Bounced Mail

When an email address is incorrect in some way (the system's name is wrong, the domain doesn't exist, whatever), the mail system will bounce the message back to the sender, much the same way that the Postal Service does when you send a letter to a bad street address. The message will include the reason for the bounce; a common error is addressing mail to an account name that doesn't exist. For example, writing to Simon Edwards at the Royal Institute of Technology at Melbourne will fail, because his account name has changed (although it wasn't know when the original message was sent).

Date:     Sun, 1 Dec 96 18:13:18 GMT
From:     relay-7.mail.demon.net Mail System (MMDF) 
Sender:   mmdf@relay-7.mail.demon.net
Subject:  Failed mail  (msg.ac527252)
To:       enquiries@active2.demon.co.uk
Cc:	  postmaster@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au
Message-ID: <849463998.718074.27@relay-7.mail.demon.net>

    Your message could not be delivered to
's9407349@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au (host: yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au) (queue: smtpns)' for the following
reason:  ' ... User unknown'

The message also includes the text of the mail, so you don't have to retype everything you wrote.

	Your message follows:
 
Received: from active2.demon.co.uk ([158.152.82.3]) by relay-5.mail.demon.net
           id ac527252; 1 Dec 96 18:04 GMT
From: Active Software 
Reply-To: Active Software 
To: s9407349@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au
CC: Ellis Pritchard ,
	Ellis Pritchard ,
	Michael Neuweiler 
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 1996 17:42:24 -0000
Message-ID: 
Organization: Active Software
Subject: Image Engineer
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

1st December 1996

Dear Simon,

1.7 Mailing Lists

People that share common interests are inclined to discuss their hobby or interest at every available opportunity. One modern way to aid in this exchange of information is by using a mailing list---usually an email address that redistributes all mail sent to it back out to a list of addresses. For example, the NetConnect mailing list has the address of netconnect@amigaworld.com. Any mail sent to that address will "explode" out to each person named in a file maintained on the AmigaWorld server.

Administrative tasks (sometimes referred to as administrivia) are often handled through other addresses, typically with the suffix `-request'. To continue the above, a request to be added to or deleted from the NetConnect list should be sent to majordomo@amigaworld.com.

When in doubt, try to write to the majordomo version of a mailing list address first; the other people on the list aren't interested in your desire to be added or deleted, and can certainly do nothing to expedite your request. Often if the administrator of a list is busy (remember, this is all peripheral to real jobs and real work), many users find it necessary to ask again and again, often with harsher and harsher language, to be removed from a list. This does nothing more than waste traffic and bother everyone else receiving the messages. If, after a reasonable amount of time, you still haven't succeeded to be removed from a mailing list, write to the postmaster at that site and see if they can help.

Exercise caution when replying to a message sent by a mailing list. If you wish to respond to the author only, make sure that the only address you're replying to is that person, and not the entire list. Often messages of the sort "Yes, I agree with you completely!" will appear on a list, boring the daylights out of the other readers. Likewise, if you explicitly do want to send the message to the whole list, you'll save yourself some time by checking to make sure it's indeed headed to the whole list and not a single person.

A list of the currently available mailing lists is available in at least two places; the first is in a file on ftp.nisc.sri.com called `interest-groups' under the `netinfo/' directory. It's updated fairly regularly, but is large (presently around 700K), so only get it every once in a while. The other list is maintained by Gene Spafford (spaf@cs.purdue.edu), and is posted in parts to the newsgroup news.lists semi-regularly. (See section Usenet News, for info on how to read that and other newsgroups.)

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