ELECTRONIC MAIL (e-mail)

What is electronic mail (e-mail)?

 

The electronic mail is a service that allows us to send and receive messages to and from any location in our country or the world in so far as the person we are sending the message to has an e-mail address. The common format of an e-mail address is as follows:

danelec@linkserve.com.ng

In any e-mail address, there is a symbol @

which is its main characteristic.

It divides the address into two sections. On the left section, a number, a full name, a code or an abbreviation that represents the owner of the e-mail account is written (in the above address, danelec is the name of the owner of the account).

The right section of the address normally represents the name of the ISP where the owner of the account is connected (i.e. linkserve is the ISP where danelec is connected).

After linkserve, we find two abbreviations, the first abbreviation represents the type of company that provides the service (i.e. the abbreviation com means commercial, like any business company. There are other types of abbreviation such as org, which means non-profit organization; mil which means military institution; net which means a company that provides network services; gov, which means government institutions; edu, which means any educational institutions such as university, secondary or primary schools).

The second abbreviation represents the country where the provider is located (i.e. ng, which means Nigeria). Every country has its own abbreviation for instance, uk, United Kingdom; it, Italy; fr, France; br, Brazil; za, South Africa; ca, Canada and so on.

The only country whose abbreviation is not included in their e-mail address is the United States due to the fact that the United States is the country that first introduced Internet and kept the right not to identify the nation. Therefore any time an address does not carry the abbreviated form of the nation, it means that the ISP providing the service is included in the United States domain registration.

 

ADVANTAGES OF E-MAIL

By using e-mail to send and receive messages, one can achieve a lot of advantages:

 

1. SPEED

The speed of sending/receiving messages by e– mail is much higher than any traditional equipment presently utilized (e.g. fax, telex). Though the same access is utilized for all the systems, i.e. the telephone line, through e-mail one can reach a speed as high as 300 or 400 times faster than that achieved by either fax or telex. This depends on some elements like traffic congestion, quality of the telephone line, modem speed and ISP speed.

2. COST

Compared to a fax, the e-mail is cheaper when in use. Anytime one is sending messages to anywhere in the world, he/she is paying the international telephone charges. This means that if somebody is sending a message to Japan by fax, the person is paying the international rate of telephone charges while through e-mail, the user is paying a local charge (which depends on how close the user is to the ISP as explained before).

3. QUALITY

The quality obtainable through e-mail is much higher than that obtained by any other traditional means, for instance; if a fax is compared with e-mail, a big advantage can be seen in the quality of e-mail messages. The message either sent or received has the same quality as the original when e-mail is used, while the quality of

 

the message sent by fax is very poor most of thetime (with the received page faint or blank).

 

4. AMOUNT OF DATA THAT CAN BE SENT

E-mail has a very important function that allows us to send/receive a very large amount of data to/from any e-mail address in the world. There is the possibility of attaching to any e-mail message that is sent, one or more files of any format which means that we can attach independent files of the same format like word processing files or files of different formats such as spread sheet files, picture files, audio files, video files and so on to an e-mail message. For instance a book of 200 pages converted into a word processing file, can be attached and sent anywhere in the country or world in less than two minutes (depending on the speed of the ISP and the traffic congestion at the time, the required time can be more or less).

                By comparison, to send the same book by fax, more time and a higher cost is required.

Furthermore, when the file is received, it can be printed out for the number of copies required or can be saved in a diskette and transferred to somebody else to produce additional copies in other computers (one must be careful that the books have no copyright so that one can make additional copies otherwise we cannot take it as free).

 

5. POSSIBILITY OF SENDING A MESSAGE TO MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS AT THE SAME TIME

Through e-mail, one can prepare and send a message with or without an attached file to many recipients, to as many addresses as required. When we are filling the address field, we have to type the addresses required one after the other, so that our message can reach all of them at the same time. Anyway, our telephone charges will be the same as when we are sending one message.

Also, the addresses can be located in all parts of the world. It will be the duty of the ISP and the router to distribute the message to each recipient.

 

6. NO NEED TO BE CONTINUOUSLY CONNECTED BY THE TELEPHONE LINE TO OUR ISP

Another big advantage of the e-mail is the fact that we need not be connected 24 hours to our ISP

 

 

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