Email Versus Internet

Email is in essence for mail transmission electronically among people. There are also 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 great attainment in the world of communication. It is a great accomplishment 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 answer. 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.
There is versatile usage of the Internet. It is not only the source of huge information, but also a very powerful media to establish direct and easy communication among people and societies. There are the following special features:
• The Information Superhighway
• The World Wide Web
• Bulletin Boards
• Chat forums
• E-mail
• Information Retrieval etc.
The Internet is the super corridor or super highway where any sort of information can be published, retrieved or exchanged. Every Internet Server stores a large number of information on different topics. And there are millions of such servers, which are active all day long, even days or months together. There is no break, no pause. So information is available any time, any moment. You may just hook with Internet and get the piles of information. The WWW is a very famous term, used to define the information population by any Internet server. It is basically a worldwide publication of the web pages to demonstrate peoples, societies and organizations. Every web page is technically a page of information, where different connecting heads/subheads are available to go through next pages of related information, which are bundled together. Bulletin Boards are actually simple forums where news, software, games, articles are bundled together with access to every member where they can directly contribute to or collect from the system, according to everybody’s requirement.
In a bulletin board, you may have the opportunity of conferencing with others, sending items without worrying whom you want to communicate with. Every member may have same freedom to collect anything at any time, according to his/her own convenience.
Email is basically for mail transmission electronically among people. There are also 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.
Email address
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.
Choice of an email program – Eudora
Eudora is one of the simplest to use and easy to install software. So it is very popular and also available everywhere. This software is discussed in the next lesson.

Using Email
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 different email systems, 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 softwares.
• After having the dial-up connection OK, we should open the Eudora.

Sending Mail

To create and send an email you have to go through 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 software, 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.
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.
The Internet is the super corridor or super highway where any sort of information can be published, retrieved or exchanged. Every Internet Server stores a large number of information on different topics. And there are millions of such servers, which are active all day long, even days or months together. There is no break, no pause. So information is available any time, any moment. You may just hook with Internet and get the piles of information!
The WWW is a very famous term, used to define the information population by any Internet server. It is basically a worldwide publication of the web pages to demonstrate peoples, societies and organisations. Every web page is technically a page of information, where different connecting heads/subheads are available to go through next pages of related information, which are bundled together Bulletin Boards are actually simple forums where news, software, games, articles are bundled together with access to every member where they can directly contribute to or collect from the system, according to everybody’s requirement.
In a bulletin board, you may have the opportunity of conferencing with others, sending items without worrying whom you want to communicate with. Every member may have same freedom to collect anything at any time, according to his/her own convenience.

Chat forums are basically forums of people to make some grouping to create small conference among them. However there may not be different types of items other than chatting or just news. In above descriptions, it was mentioned that Internet is the worldwide Information Super Highway. But to collect the information, you must get help of the information retrieval procedures. There are several popular websites which use powerful search engines to collect various types of information within seconds. They are Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista and like. There also search sites for specific topics, like MEDLINE, Library of Congress, and Amazon etc. They also act as publication centres of different news, advertisements and other items.
Browser is another kind of Internet software, which is used to browse or search and collect information in the Internet. Example: Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator etc.
Aspects of a browser
A browser must have the following features:
•It should be user friendly.
•It should allow all up-to-date techniques of web browsing.
•It should have different formatting facilities to choose among different options to control the presentation format or speed of the web pages.
Choice of a browser – Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator is the first very easy and also popular tool to browse in the Internet using efficient technology. It has most of the important features that a browser should have.