The importance of Email and Internets

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Email is vitally important basically for mail transmission electronically among people in the world of globalization in the field of modern technology. There are also innumerable mailboxes, mail servers and other features like those in traditional post office systems. Only the difference is the simplicity and speed in the information transmission via computer and Internet. E-mail is a vast accomplishment in the world of communication. It is a great attainment because it allows messages reach its recipients within a very short time. If anybody asks how much time it would take for a letter to reach Bangladesh from EU or USA, even the top officials of the Post department would not be able to react. The fastest mail delivery system of the world, DHL takes a minimum of three days to deliver mail to a client. There are of course other communication devices like phone, fax, telex, but often those are too costly. Among all the media of information transmission, email is the best as it is the cheapest and also the fastest. Also it ensures privacy or confidentiality, as the message is stored in the mailbox of the recipient directly. The sender can be sure that the recipient will obtain the message, which is sometimes impossible to assume in case of Fax. Another great benefit of email is that a user can access his/her messages from any computer of the world that has Internet access, whenever he/she wants to check for e-mail.

Every email recipient must have an email address to be identified and to temporarily store the message in the mail server. If there is no address, how you will be able to locate any person among millions of people. You must have an address, and so email is sent to addresses. Example: alam@bangla.net is an email address. Every address must be specified according to the mail server. The unique name before the @ sign would give the identification of the recipient. Here alam is the user or recipient and bangla.net is the mail server.  Email works like a postal system. When someone mails a message (letter), first it is stored in a mail server. This is just like posting the letters in the local post office or letterbox.  Mail servers are the storage points like the postal department’s post offices, which act as temporary storage during transfer of letters from sender to receiver. In case of electronic mail, mail servers serve as the sender’s post office; the e-mails are then forwarded to numerous other mail servers before it reaches the recipient’s mail server. The sender’s mail server also plays important role in controlling data traffic. When in any network junction there are jams, then server stores some messages and sends the messages after the network gets free. In this way it protects the traffic jams in the message paths. Besides, there are a different email system, which acts as gateways or translators among POP3 or X.400.

When the message reaches the destination mail-server, it is stored there until the recipient checks for it and receives it.

Starting the Email program - Eudora

·         Eudora Pro is the most popular among the email software.

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After having the dial-up connection OK, we should open the Eudora.

Sending Mail

To create and send an email you have to go thrugh the following steps-

Procedure

1.    Select Message menu

2.    Select New Message.

3.    Write the email address of the recipient.

4.    Then type your necessary message.

5.    Then click on send button.

Address Books

It is the place where you can create, store and retrieve the important addresses of the recipients of your emails.

Mailing Lists

Every time you want to mail, you have to type various addresses. You may keep mailing lists for this purpose. If you have already addresses in the address books, you may create mailing lists choosing from them.

Mail Attachments

You may send mail attachments with your mail. This may be any document to be opened using other softwares, games, software itself, or photos and so on.

Receiving Mail

You can check to see if you have received any email message. To check for any e-mails receipts you have to connect with the Internet server through the Dial-up network. After having the connection OK you have to open the Eudora Pro. Then you have to follow the following two steps:

Procedure

1.    Select File menu

2.    Select Check mail.

Type your password in the window that appears. If there were any messages for you i.e. assuming that someone has sent you e-mail you would be able to see it then. Actually the received e-mails then are transferred from the mail server into your computer’s hard disk.

Responding to Mail

After receiving any mail you may respond to it by choosing Reply option in the Message menu. Then a similar screen like that for sending email would be appeared.

 

Forwarding Mail

When you want to share any mail with other(s), you may just forward it to another address by choosing Forward option in the Message menu.

Web Browsing

Web Browsing involves going to different Internet sites and read the information available there. In the Internet you can get daily news, weather reports, book airline tickets, order stationary from on-line shops, get scientific information, papers, read books, view movies etc. If you want to buy any item through Internet, you can order that item. You can even pay through Internet. In short, in the Internet you can do almost anything and everything, most of all, all the information of the world is assembled here.

The steps to browse the Internet are described below:

Procedure

1.    First connect to your ISP through the dial-up networking.

2.    Then open any of the browser software listed below:

§  Netscape Navigator Gold

§  Internet Explorer

3.    Then in the address prompt, give the web address of any web site  and press Enter.

4.    The web site appears and information is available there.

How to connect to the Internet

Dial up Networking

·         We use telephone lines to log into the Internet server.

·         Logging into any remote server by telephone line is called dial-up networking.

Procedure

1.    Start menu

2.    Programs

3.    Accessories

4.    Dial-up networking

5.    A black screen appears, asking for your User ID and Password

6.    Type your username and password

7.    It might ask for other information which will be provided by your ISP

As shown in the above figure, it is physically possible to interconnect millions of computers through satellite system and using telephone lines creating a large network. Direct cable connection is an alternative to satellite connection among LANs. Basically Internet is the network of numerous worldwide networks. A server called Internet Server also known as ISP (Internet Service Provider) plays the role of the server computer.

In view of the above it is evident that if someone has an account or user permission he/she can enter into his/her ISP’s Internet Server, through which he/she can access any Internet Server in the world. Any person can browse through any information from millions of computers after he/she enters an Internet server. For this reason, Internet is a great wonder of modern science, the so-called information super highway. A web-site is a hard disk space in one of the billions of computers in the Internet. A certain web-site will have information on a specific topic. For example Education, Sports, Shopping, Business or any other topic will have several web-sites dedicated to those topics. We can get the news from web-sites of CNN or BBC. A web-site is identified on the Internet by a unique address.