adapted from Kenji Kitao & S. Kathleen Kitao and Kevin Savage

E-mail addresses may look like this:

     username@host.domain.country

jjones@ozemail.com.au

kkitao@mail.doshisha.ac.jp

Letters or numbers on the left side of @ make up the personal ID for the individual's e-mail address, and the letters on the right side identify the computer which has the e-mail account. The two-letter code at the end identifies the country: au is for Australia, uk is for Britain, and jp is for Japan. The letters ac means academic center, usually a school. The letters com  indicate a commercial company. Doshisha is the name of an institution. mail is the name of the computer in that institution, since some institutions are using more than one computer. Most e-mail addresses in the United States use a slightly different system. There is no code for the country, and edu at the end is an educational institution.

Using the Internet, you can send e-mail (electronic mail) to anyone who is connected to it. You can send/receive letters, drawings or photos, sound and even video, if your computer has such capabilities.

E-mail is as fast as a telephone call, and you can reach people all over the world. Even if the receiver is not there, the message will stay there, and when he/she checks the e-mail, he/she will find it, so in that sense, it is like a fax. Even if there are many pieces of e-mail, subject lines and the senders' names appear on the screen, so that the receiver can pick out the important ones. In this sense, e-mail is more convenient than a fax.

When you send an e-mail message, you enter the receiver's address, type in the message, and send it. You can keep a copy of the message for yourself, if you wish. You can write a letter on your word processor and upload that file and send it. For a longer letter, this is easier.    As most e-mail is text based users look for shortcuts and abbreviations in typing.

No addressing of envelopes or even typing of long e-mail addresses is necessary.

You can edit other people's e-mail and use it to forward or answer. You can keep a copy, and you do not have to pay for postage or telephone bills if you are using your school computer terminal. Since e-mail is an electronic file, it does not take much space like ordinary letters or fax.

A variation on using a mail client is to use a browser abased mail service that runs in a noram web page.  The first of these was HotMail although there are many other such services now available.  The advantage is that it can be accessed from any Internet connection anywhere in the world.  The disadvantages are that these services do not have all of the features of a mail client, usually have advertising attached to them, and take up more bandwidth.

There are, however, some dangers, disadvantages, and limitations of e-mail.

Discussion Lists

There are many discussion lists (sometimes called mailing lists or just lists. They are usually free to join (subscribe to). From a central computer, anything members send to the list is distributed to all other members. People send questions, opinions, announcements, responses, and other information of interest to members to the list.