Emails

Emails, otherwise known as electronic mail, were created in 1971 and have been used increasingly since then as the internet has developed and become available to more and more people.

In short, an email is a message that is sent to an individual post box on a mail server until the email client picks it up and places it in the inbox for your intended reader to find.

To use email you need to have a connection to an email servcer which is what distributes and stores the emails. You also need an email client.

A client is a program such as Outlook Express on a computer connecter to the internet, or a browser-based client which could be MSN or Yahoo, etc. Emaiul can now also be used on your mobile phone with the help of GPRS, WAP or SMS, etc. Furthermore, it can be used via a digital TV or games statrion that has a connection to the internet.

An email system allows you to:

• View a list of messages in you inbox, showing you who sent them and what time they were sent, the subject of the email and the date.
• Select emails individually to view.
• Compose emails with a subject heading and textual content - you can also attach binary files of almost any type at all - and send them to another email address.

The email is usually composed in an editing window within the mail client of your choice. This is HTML-based. The text inside the frame can be cut and pasted into another document or application.

Emails are generally sent using an SMTP server, (which stands for simple mail transfer protocol-port 25), and received using a POP3 server, (which stands for post office protocol-port 110), or an IMAP server, (which stands for internet mail access protocol-post 143).

The advantages of email are that it is very simple and easy to use. It is extremely fast and provides a permanent record of communications which can be useful, (and is one of the faults with mobile phones). It is an informal medium but you can make it formal by what sort of language / tone and what font you choose to use.

With an attachment on your email, it is capable of delivering almost any type of binary file to practically any recipient or group of recipients, so long as they are connected to the internet.

On the other hand, these advantages can be countered with disadvantages, as can most things. But, in this case, they can be really quite serious...

To put it simply, it is extremely easy for someone to send inappropriate messages or attachments to people that would not be effected if the email did not exist.

People sometimes "spoof" other peoples' email addresses and, if you thought it was someone you knew, you could open the email which would lead to the next problem in line: computer viruses.

Viruses, worms and Trojans can be attached to an email very easily and they cause a lot of damage if you open the file and let them into your computer system. They can either destroy everything and, sometimes, they can allow someone far away to hack into your computer with ease because the security on the computer would already be faulty at this point, (this is usually done by a Trojan).

Spam mail can also fill you inbox up, along with entire areas of the internet itself, which could prevent you from seeing useful information because there is so much spam there to distract you from it.