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Sending E-Mail

Regardless of the e-mail program or online service you use to send e-mail, there are some things that are common to all e-mail users.

Parts of an E-Mail Message

Every E-mail message contains the following elements:

To: - This is the recipient's e-mail address. Located in the e-mail message's header, this is perhaps the most important information. Without it, your e-mail program would not know who to send your e-mail to.
From: - This is the sender's (your) e-mail address. This is also located in the header field and is required if you want the recipient to know who is sending the e-mail. It is also used if the recipient wishes to reply to your e-mail.
Subject: - This is where you are to put a short description of the content of your e-mail message. Its purpose is simply to give the recipient an idea of what the message without him having to read the entire message.
Message: - This area is the space where you type your e-mail message.
Cc: - Short for Carbon copy, this is the e-mail address (or addresses) of a person (or people) who you want to receive a copy of the message.
Bcc: - Short for Blind ccarbon Ccopy, this is the e-mail address (or addresses) of a person (or people) who you want to receive a copy of the message, without the receiver having the ability to view who you have sent the E-mail to in addition to who it was sent to.

E-Mail Addresses

E-Mail addresses follow the format of: username@host.subdomain.top-level-domain. Although e-mail addresses can look somewhat awkward at first, they are actually quite straighforward. The username is the user ID of the person you wish to send e-mail to. It is usually the same thing that that person uses to log in to the Internet. It usually will look something like jjones, or perhaps maryj25. The "@" symbol is a divider between the username and the rest of the e-mail address, which contains information about which computer on the Internet the person is located on.

The host, subdomain, and top-level-domain fields are used by your e-mail software to determine which computer on the Internet to send your e-mail to. There can be any number of host fields, and sometimes there are none. The subdomain is usually the name (or an abbreviation) of the company or organization that the recipient uses to receive e-mail. Finally, the top-level-domain field consists of three letters and is used to classify the nature of the company or orangization listed in the subdomain field. Each top-level domain represents the following:

COM	Commercial Business
ORG	Non-profit Organization
EDU	Educational Institution
GOV	Goverment Agency
MIL	Military Agency
NET	Internet Provider or Online Network

Once you have an e-mail address, you will probably want to go out and tell everyone what it is. Well, in order to do this, you need to know how to properly prounounce your e-mail address. To explain the process, we will use the example:

mrsley@yahoo.com
Using this example, you would say "mrsley at yahoo dot COM." Notice how the "@" symbol is pronounced "at" and the periods are pronounced "dot," not period. As for the top-level domains, they are pronounced as follows:

COM	cahm
ORG	oarg
EDU	say each letter
GOV	guv
MIL	mill
NET	net

Remember that you should always spell out parts of e-mail addresses that are abnormal or unusually spelled. It is my recommendation that you keep it as simple as possible for ease of use and to remember. In addition, use all lowercase letters and try to stay away from using numbers if at all possible.

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