Electronic mail (e-mail)
Email service provided by the Internet is a very effective means of communication as it allows two or more persons in remote places to communicate with each other. More plainly, e-mail is a message that may contain text, files, images, or other attachments sent through a network to a specified individual or group of individuals. The first e-mail was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Tomlinson sent the e-mail to himself as a test e-mail message To use the e-mail service, a user must have a valid email account There are two ways in which a user can obtain an email account. The first way is to obtain an email account from an ISP. The second way to obtain an email account is to get registered on one of the websites such as gmail.com and yahoo.com, which provide free e-mail facilities to their users. The email address consists of two parts separated by sign such as digitaltech@gmail.com. The first part written before @ symbol in the email address is the unique identity of the user who uses the email service on the Internet. The other part written after @ symbol is the name of the website, which provides the email service. In case a user is using the email account of an ISP, the part after the @ sign will consist of the name of the website owned by the ISP No two users can have the same email addresses.
The email service can be used by a user to send and receive email messages. An email message has two sections, a header section, and a body section. The header section contains information about the sender, the receiver and the subject of the email message. It consists of the fields such as to, cc and subject. The to field contains the email address of the person to whom the e-mail message is to be sent. The cc field or the carbon copy field contains the email addresses of other persons to whom a copy of the e-mail message has to be sent. The body section contains the actual text message, which has to be sent. This section also contains a signature block at the end where the sender places his/her signature. The user can also attach documents to the email.
