Your email client and you

We all take emailing for granted. We often pop off a quick message just to ask if a recipe needs garlic, to wish a distant relative happy birthday, and to see how someone’s day is going. Its an ideal way to keep in contact with family members who live far away, many people have made new friends and some have even found their spouses via email. Email has become a vital component of business and helps pave the way for smoother transactions and interactions. It shortens the time between communication and leads to things being done more rapidly. It also leaves evidence of the communication as proof of things said and done.

Darwin Magazine: Prime Movers claims that the first email was sent in 1971 by an engineer names Ray Tomlinson. Tomlinson used the @ sign to designate the receiving machine in his breakthrough, and was thus able to send messages to other machines on the Internet. Before the use of the @ sign it was only possible to send messages to users on a single machine.

An email message consists of pieces of text; it started out that way in the beginning and is still that way today. The addition of attachments added to the length of emails but didn’t change their structure; they maintained their basic text format.

In order to send and receive messages, you make use of an email client. These clients are often well-known, stand-alone clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasus or Eudora. There are also dozens of free email services that are available on the Internet like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail. Clients generally offer their subscribers, paid or not, four basic services: 1) a list of all messages in your mailbox displaying the message headers. The header includes information such as who sent the mail, the subject, the time it was sent and occasionally the size of the mail, 2) it allows you to select a message from your inbox so that you can read it, 3) it allows you to create new messages and send them, 4) it enables you to add attachments to messages that you want to send and save the attachments that you have received.

An email server is another vital component in the sending of email messages. The server is necessary for the client to connect to, they listen to specific ports and wait for people or programmes to attach to the port. As with clients, there are a variety of servers: web servers, FTP servers, telnet servers, and email servers. These servers run on millions of machines on the Internet at any given moment during the day.

As more mail is sent to your address the server simply adds those messages to the bottom of the file, in the order in which they arrived (depending on how you like to receive mail). When you decide to read them your client simply connects to the server and the message is downloaded onto your computer. The two main servers in use at the moment are the STMP server – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which handles outgoing mail, and the POP3 server or IMAP server, both of which handle incoming mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol and IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol.

You might want to add attachments to email messages that you send. Attachments can take any of the following forms: word processing documents, spreadsheets, sound files, snapshots and pieces of software. An attachment is not usually text and since emails contain only text information, this presents a slight problem. In the early days of email they used a programme called uuencode to solve the problem. The programme assumed that the file contained binary information and extracted 3 bytes to convert them into 4 text characters. Basically it produced an encoded version of the original binary file so that it contained only text characters.

There are many companies that provide professional email services. These services can be especially useful in businesses that don’t have the time to manage their email systems as regularly and as efficiently as they should. Email service providers are a cost effective option especially when you consider the expense and time lost in trying to manage challenging systems, writing your own backups, setting spam filters, anti-virus protection, remote access, staying on top of hardware and software upgrades, and constantly updating security settings. Email service providers can take care of all that and more, which allows you more time to focus on your business.

Email is a godsend in the world of communication, but remember that once it’s sent there’s no bringing it back, so consider your words carefully. There is always the chance that you could accidentally send the email off to the wrong person, so consider: are you comfortable with your boss or your mother reading the racy email that you intended for your boyfriend regarding your plans for your anniversary night? If you are, then hit the send button by all means. However, if the thought makes you blush, perhaps you should find some other means of communicating your intentions.
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