Electronic mail is one of the most popular features of the Internet. You can chat with your friends and family (and total strangers), conduct business, send documents, and stay in touch with people near and far. You can even check your e-mail while on the road!

• The basics of sending and receiving
• E-mail clients
• E-mail terminology
• Anatomy of an e-mail address
• What about attachments?
• The scoop on newsgroups

The basics of sending and receiving

To send and receive electronic-mail messages, or e-mail, over the Internet and to organize your messages, you need an e-mail account. You can get this through an Internet service provider (ISP) or online service provider. You also need an e-mail client—e-mail software for your computer. Your e-mail client creates an inbox on your computer. When you check your e-mail, new messages are downloaded into your inbox.

E-mail clients

Here are some examples of e-mail clients:

Microsoft® Outlook® 2000—a messaging and collaboration client; provides advanced e-mail, calendar, and contact management and a platform for workgroup information sharing when used with Microsoft Exchange Server. Outlook 2000 has loads of terrific new features. Check them out!

Hotmail™—the world's leading provider of free^* e-mail. Because it is Web based, everything you need to use Hotmail resides on the Internet, rather than on your computer. So you can use Hotmail on any computer that has access to the Internet. If you travel, move, or change your Internet service provider, your Hotmail e-mail address and service stay the same.

Microsoft Outlook Express—designed for users who need fast, reliable e-mail and newsgroup functionality without the full capabilities of Outlook. Outlook Express is included in the Microsoft Windows® 98 operating system and is especially easy to use if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser software version 5.0 and 5.5.

Microsoft Exchange—included in the Microsoft Windows 95 operating system. Businesses today rely on their messaging and collaboration servers more than ever. Exchange gives you a comprehensive messaging platform, with the tools to create rich collaboration applications.

E-mail terminology

There are many acronyms associated with e-mail. Here are some that you may come across:

• SMTP—simple mail transfer protocol; the standard rules that many e-mail clients use to handle outgoing e-mail messages.
• POP3—postoffice protocol version 3; the standard rules that many e-mail clients use to handle incoming e-mail messages.
• MIME—multipurpose Internet mail extensions; a format for turning an e-mail attachment, such as a Microsoft Word file, into ASCII text so it can be sent from one e-mail account to another.

E-mail clients built on standards like SMTP and POP3 can share information with each other, so we don't all need to use the same e-mail client. To set up your e-mail client, you may need to know your SMTP server address and your POP3 server address. If so, your Internet service provider can give you this information. Some e-mail clients use programs called wizards to help you get set up.

Anatomy of an e-mail address

To send a message to someone, you must type his or her e-mail address in the To section of your e-mail message. Generally, there are two parts to your e-mail address: your logon identity and the identity of your ISP. These are separated by the symbol @. A typical e-mail address for someone who uses Hotmail, for example, looks like this: yourname@hotmail.com.

The extension—.com—indicates that Hotmail is a commercial establishment. Other common extensions are .gov for government users and .edu for educational users. E-mail addresses outside the United States may include letters that indicate the country of the user's ISP.

Sites to visit

• Hotmail - sign up for a free account

What about attachments?

You can send more than simple text in your e-mail messages. You can also attach computer documents—including word-processor, spreadsheet, graphic, and video files—to an e-mail message. So e-mail is a useful way to share files that more than one person wants or needs.

With Microsoft Outlook 2000, e-mail gets even more sophisticated and easier. Outlook 2000 allows you to send messages on hypertext markup language (HTML) "stationery," which contains background graphics and special preselected font designs and colors to match. You now can send e-mail directly from any application found in Microsoft Office 2000.

Special notes

• The person who receives your e-mail with an attachment can open the attachment if he or she has the program in which the attachment was created.
• If the recipient does not have the program you used to create your attachment, he or she may be able to get the appropriate viewer such as Microsoft Word viewer or Microsoft PowerPoint® viewer. A viewer contains the components of a program needed to display a file created with the full version of the program.
• To send an attachment, your e-mail client converts the attachment's digital code into ASCII text, using a format such as UUENCODE or MIME. In order for the recipient to read the attachment, the recipient's e-mail client must be able to decode this format, or he or she must have another program that can decode it.

Sites to visit

• Microsoft Office home page
• Microsoft Download Center - download a viewer for Excel, Word, or PowerPoint

The scoop on newsgroups

If your e-mail client is also a newsreader, you can use it to subscribe to, read messages from, and post messages to newsgroups, which are online discussions on practically any topic. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 and 5.5 makes newsgroup access easy. On the Go menu, simply click News. Internet Explorer automatically launches Microsoft Outlook Express and opens your newsgroups folder so you can get down to business.

Here are some newsgroup basics:

• Each newsgroup covers a particular topic, often alluded to in its name.
• A newsgroup is a discussion string of related messages. Each message responds to an earlier message or addresses the overall newsgroup topic in some way. You can post your own message in response to the messages that interest you most.
• You can find newsgroups that interest you by searching for them through the Deja.com site. Together, newsgroups make up Usenet, which you can think of as part of the Internet.

Before you join in:

• Read a newsgroup's FAQ, or frequently asked questions, file first to learn more about the group. Almost all newsgroups have a FAQ.
• Check whether the newsgroup has a file containing its charter and rules. If it does, read this before you post messages.
• Read a good portion of a discussion string before joining in. Others in the discussion will appreciate that you took the time to get familiar with the conversation first.

Sites to visit

• Internet Explorer 5.5 Home Page – download the browser
• Deja.com
• ZDNet's "Usenet 101" news basics article