Anyone on the net can receive electronic mail. It’s part of the definition of being “on the net”. People who are completely on the net can do ‘talk’ as well, engaging in immediate, written, conversations. Next year, you’ll be able to talk by actually speaking into a microphone, and even, if you have a video camera, let the other person see you. There are people doing it today, but they’re computer geeks and porn stars.
Your electronic mail address is your username, as provided by your Internet Service Provider ‘@’ some mail computer. For example, my address is capvideo@hoboes.com. My username is “capvideo” and the mail computer that handles my e-mail is “hoboes.com”. If you want people to talk to you or send you mail, you need to give them your address. If you want to talk to someone or send them mail, you need to get their address. Each address has two parts: the person and the place, and they’re separated by the ‘@’ sign.
My recommendation for e-mail software is a free package called Eudora”. It follows the “user interface” standards for your computer, allowing you to more easily integrate the rest of your work with your electronic mail. You can then copy and paste from your mail to your word processor, for example, and vice versa. Besides Eudora, you can also use the built-in e-mail software in Netscape Communicator, but it’s slow as crap.
You have to tell your mail software where the mail is supposed to go. D’oh. Usually, this is called “recipient” or “to”. Their address is going to look a lot like yours.
Most e-mail software allows you to keep an “address book”. This is a list of people whose addresses you know. If “jerry” is in your address book, you’ll be able to say “send this message to jerry” instead of “send this message to capvideo@hoboes.com”.
You can add addresses to your address book by hand, or you can tell your mail software to grab an address off of a message you’re reading. In Eudora, look for the menu item Make Nickname .
You don’t need to give your message a subject, but it helps. The subject gives your recipient some idea of what your message is about, and lets them know you’re not a complete putz. If you’re sending your message to a group of people, the subject lets those who want to read about your topic choose your message, and lets the others ignore it.
Whenever you Reply to a message, the letters “RE:” are added in front of the original subject. If you’re changing the topic, change the subject. Otherwise, this lets your recipient know that you are replying to their message.
Subjects should be short, a phrase at most, and to the point. Subjects such as “This is important”, “Important!!!”, “I need help!”, and “O.J. Simpson” tend to be left until there’s nothing better to do. “Sex” usually gets people’s attention, especially when combined with “free”, as in, “Free Sex” or “Sex Free”. YMMV. Some good examples of subjects:
FTD Order Confirmation
Recent Suicide Numbers from WHO
San Diego Convention Journal-Thursday
Eudora: Why a “username not found” error?
You can send your message to more than one person by putting multiple addresses in the “To” line. When you put someone’s address in the “CC”, or “Carbon Copy” line, it does the same thing: it sends the message to everyone you list. But it does it in a way that says “you’re not part of this discussion, but I thought you might be interested in this particular message”.
Some mail software allows readers to “reply” to all “recipients”. Usually, this form of reply will only reply to those recipients on the “To” line. It will ignore those on the “CC” line.
You can attach documents to your electronic mail message. If you’ve got a paper written in ClarisWorks, for example, or a budget spreadsheet that you want to send to someone, you’ll do it by writing them a short message and attaching the file to that message. In Eudora, you select the menu item “Attach Document”, and choose the document from the dialog box.
When you “attach” documents in this manner, they have to be encoded for electronic mailing. Basically, mail messages have to be all text, but most of your documents have special codes in them that the software put there. So your mail software encodes the document in a special all-text format. In theory, the mail software used by whoever you send the mail to will decode the attached document and it’ll be as good as new.
Remember also, that if you send someone a document that you wrote using a special software package, they have to have that software as well. If you wrote it with ClarisWorks, they need to have ClarisWorks. If you drew the picture using Adobe Photoshop LE, they need to have Adobe Photoshop. There are ways around this. Many document ‘types’ have a standard way of transferring information. You’ll need to read your manual to know how to do this, but usually the “Save As...” menu item will have them. Word Processors, for example, can almost always save in “Rich Text Format”, or “RTF”. Every modern word processor should be able to read a file that’s been saved in “RTF” format.
In general, if you don’t get any message back, the person you sent to is ignoring you. If your mail didn’t make it to the recipient, you will almost always get a message back saying that something went wrong. It is possible, albeit extremely rare, for mail to get completely lost, however, so you’ll want to keep copies of important mail that you send. You can tell your e-mail software to automatically keep a copy of all “outgoing” mail. (You’ll need to read the instructions to find out how.) You’ll also want to do this if you like to refer back to messages you’ve already sent.
There are two common errors that will cause mail to be returned to you. In Internet terms, mail that gets returned to you is “bounced” back to you. Mail will be bounced to you if the “place” is wrong or if the “person” is wrong.
á If the “place” is wrong, you’ll get a mail message back from the postmaster in your domain telling you that the “hostname” could not be found.
á If the “person” is wrong, you’ll get a mail message back from the “place” computer telling you that the “username” does not exist.
In both of these cases, double-check the address to make sure you typed it correctly. Be especially careful of letters and numbers: ‘1’s and ‘l’s and ‘0’s and ‘O’s.
You can send secure e-mail using “PGP”. This will allow you to send mail that only the recipient can read, and to verify that you know the person sending you mail. In both cases, they have to be using PGP as well. PGP is the most trusted and most common security software for Internet communications.
You can “talk” with people in “real time” as well. The talk command is the “real time” equivalent of electronic mail. Real time means that the person on the other end sees what you type when you type it , and you see what they type at the same time. There is “talk” software for the Macintosh and for Windows. You can also use talk from your Unix “shell” account if you have one. From the Unix command line, type talk email address and press return. For example, to talk to your friend arnie@hollywood.com, type talk arnie@hollywood.com and press return.
Your computer screen will split into two parts, and, at the top, it’ll tell you what it’s trying to do. When it starts, it “rings” the other person. If the other person answers, your “connection” is “established”. Whatever you type will appear in the top half, and whatever they type will appear in the bottom half of the screen.
Talk will not work on all addresses. Some people have e-mail addresses without having direct Internet connections. Both parties must have direct Internet access in order to “talk”. Other times, their software fails to interact correctly with the your talk software. That’s a common problem with Sun computers, for example. Look at Stairways for Macintosh ‘talk’ software, or Download.Com for other ‘talk’ software.
“Talk” requests break up your screen, beep at you, and otherwise try to get your attention. It can be very annoying to get a “talk” request from someone while you’re trying to do something else, and it gets really annoying when you get lots of “talk” requests.
You should generally not try to talk to people without asking permission first, through electronic mail. You should especially use e-mail first for people with whom you have only a passing acquaintance, or whom you don’t know at all.
There are two ways of doing anything in this world: the easy way, and the hard way. Now, suppose you want to find out a person’s e-mail address. How do you do it? Well, there’s an easy way, and...
The easiest way to find someone’s electronic mail address is to telephone them and ask them for their address! It’s easy and you only have to do it once.
Since you’re too embarrassed to give them a phone call, you can always try the on-line white pages. It won’t work, but at least you’ll feel like you did something.
Check out Yahoo’s White Pages. You’ll probably get a long listing of people whose name corresponds to your friend’s name. Pay attention to where they’re at! If you’re looking for a “James Stratton” in Michigan, and find one in San Francisco, chances are pretty good that it’s not the right one. On the other hand, if you find a Jerry Stratton in the United States of America, that doesn’t particularly help you in deciding if it’s a good address or not.
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