All About E-mail

E-mail is no longer the plaything of corporate communications departments and computer
enthusiasts. Millions of people in the United States and around the world are using e-mail daily in
place of the telephone, faxes, courier shipments, or conventional letter mail. By enabling individuals
and companies to communicate both efficiently and inexpensively around the globe, e-mail has
emerged as a key communications tool for the 1990s and beyond.

How e-mail is used

Four major factors have contributed to the popularity of e-mail: it is global, unique, fast,
and cheap. It's global because anyone in the world can use it; unique because users have
their own specific addresses and mailboxes; and, because messages usually arrive only
moments after they are sent and cost only dial-up time, e-mail is both fast and cheap.

For further evidence of the popularity of e-mail, take a look at the business cards you have
collected from clients or contacts lately. Chances are that some of them include e-mail
addresses, along with telephone and facsimile numbers. Using e-mail can eliminate the tedium
of "telephone tag." E-mail also sidesteps busy fax machines that spew out page after page of
often misplaced or misdirected information. With e-mail, your messages appear directly on the
computer screen used by the individual you want to reach. More importantly, the content of
the message can be much richer.

Using the right software, you can attach computer documents to
your messages, allowing you, for example, to send a
spreadsheet file with financial projections and a word-processed
report as part of your message. Consider the implications for an
independent contractor, for example, whose customer wants a
complex quote on building a house, with variables based on the
square footage, number of rooms, bathrooms, fixtures, and
other considerations. The online contractor could e-mail the
customer a spreadsheet model that would allow the customer to
figure out the costs. This system would also help the customer
who can immediately determine the impact of changing a
specification without having to wait for the contractor to do it.

Meanwhile, e-mail is offering home users a whole new way to
stay in touch. Many people find that when their kids go away to school or college, it is often
difficult to find time to write or to find a mutually convenient time to speak on the phone. With
e-mail, parents and their connected kids can communicate at any time that is convenient - with
the knowledge that their messages will be delivered almost immediately and can be read at
any time. And those messages can also contain scanned pictures, AVI video files, copies of
recent school presentations, and even voice messages.

In the past, the biggest roadblock to the success of e-mail has been the lack of a large number
of users. Although dozens of personal computer electronic messaging services have been
available, they were not linked until fairly recently. This meant that in order to communicate,
both the sender and receiver had to subscribe to the same e-mail service. Within the past few
years, however, e-mail systems worldwide have become connected to the Internet, and today
messages can be transported virtually anywhere in the world.

Bill Gates on the Importance of E-mail

According to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, e-mail is vital to the way many companies, including
Microsoft, do business. "Messaging is my most important application. [When I look] at how
much time I spend working with spreadsheets and word processors versus e-mail, I find that I
spend over five times as much time in e-mail as in anything else. It's probably the most
mission-critical application for Microsoft in terms of running the company. If we had to pick one
application that would keep running no matter what, e-mail would absolutely be it," he says. "I
have a lot of personal experience in information overload messages since an article in New
Yorker magazine published my e-mail address. Until that time, I had a fairly macho attitude that
nobody needed rules to control their inbox. I could read all my own messages the second they
came in, and answer every message every day. But when I started getting thousands of
messages, I actually learned to value the richness of the mail client that could automaticaly
see which messages were coming from people I've never communicated with and automatically
classify those. I do read these messages. I may not get around to reading them for four or five
days, and some of them are more deserving of replies than others. I think it is valuable to read
through those messages, whether they comment on products or new opportunities or
whatever. It's really very fascinating."

Gates also believes this information exchange must move beyond borders and must not be
limited to implementation on a single site or in a single country's offices. "Companies are
distributed [globally] now, not just in one state or even in one country, and it's important to
get all of those people working together in a very effective fashion," he explains. "Electronic
communication tools are the key that allows re-engineering to take place. It's been very
exciting to see those two trends come together at the same time: the tools that make it
possible along with the desire to have these capabilities. The return on investment of many of
these tools has been very, very dramatic."

Looking further down the road, Gates sees the current movement toward
stronger e-mail and messaging standards as a key motivating factor in the
construction of the much-touted information highway. "One thing I think is
really misunderstood in all the writing about that phenomenon is that
electronic messaging is the beginning of this information highway," he says.
"In fact, all of the issues being addressed here are the fundamental issues:
security, administration, and interoperability of all these different systems.
Certainly this broad connectivity will be available on business desktops long
before it is available to everyone in their homes.

"In fact, I think we'll see a dramatic rise in the kinds of networks that connect businesses,
whether they're private networks or the Internet backbone, whether it's employees being able
to work at home with an ISDN line, or whether it's companies putting information about their
products on bulletin-board servers. That kind of bottom-up, business-driven use of
communication is where the information highway starts."

The basics of sending e-mail

The key to sending an Internet e-mail message lies in the Internet address. Before you send
e-mail to anyone else, you will need to know your own e-mail address. This will probably be
shown on the registration documents that are provided with your electronic mail service
provider's registration package. Generally, your address is your logon identity, followed by the
"@" sign and then the identity of your service provider. For example, a typical Internet address
might look something like this: yourname@msn.com

How to send e-mail

The elements of the address are not particularly cryptic; the name of the recipient is
represented by "yourname," and he or she is a subscriber at (or @) MSN, The Microsoft
Network. The final designation in the address (.com) indicates that the service provider is a
commercial establishment. Other extensions that you might typically see include .gov for
government Internet users and .edu for educational establishments that use the Internet. For
many Internet addresses outside the United States, the address also often includes a
designation that indicates the country of the subscriber's service.

You can also send carbon copies (Cc:) or blind carbon copies (Bcc:) of an e-mail message by
indicating the recipients in the message headers. Carbon copies are typically sent to people
who might need to know about the information in the message but do not have to act on it
directly. You can also send blind carbon copies of your e-mail. When you send someone a blind
carbon copy of your message, no one else will know that this person is receiving a copy of your
message. Understanding how addresses are created and how copies are distributed is not
crucial to using the Internet. All you need to know is the accurate address of the person or
organization to whom you want to send your mail: the Internet will handle the rest.

Sending attachments in e-mail

Once your Internet e-mail system is up and running, whether it's using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook
ExpressMicrosoft Exchange Inbox in Windows 95 or a standard Windows-based package such as
Eudora, you will probably turn your thoughts to the task of composing your e-mail messages.

Everybody knows that e-mail is a great medium for exchanging text messages, and more
people are learning that e-mail is also an important way to exchange other forms of electronic
data, such as pictures, audio files, and applications. In fact, anything on your computer can
now be attached to an e-mail message by using a program that converts digital computer code
into ordinary ASCII text.

By attaching the file in its native format (word processing, spreadsheet, or graphic file), you
can guarantee that the recipient will receive exactly the document he or she needs in the
appropriate format. You do need to ensure that all recipients have the application that created
the document - otherwise, they will not be able to view it. If, however, you are sending a
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint document, you can get around this
problem by having your recipient download the appropriate viewer from the Microsoft World
Wide Web site on the Internet.

Using the right software

Once you have mastered the art of using attachments, you can make the text of your message
look better by using the appropriate software. Microsoft Internet Mail, for example, supports
Rich Text Format (RTF), which gives you a lot of formatting choices for your e-mail text. You can
also use Internet Assistant for Word to convert your Microsoft Word file into HyperText Markup
Language (HTML). The resulting file will arrive in your recipient's mailbox as a World Wide Web
page, complete with pictures! The recipient will, however, need a World Wide Web browser (or
a word processor capable of reading HTML files) to properly view this enclosed page. If
recipients do not have a browser, Microsoft Internet Assistant for Word will allow them to at
least view the World Wide Web page without it. One final note: you do not have to know what
many of the acronyms and technical terms here actually mean - it is enough that you have
some idea of what they actually do and how they can help you make better use of e-mail.

A new way of communicating

The next time you're thinking of sending a letter or a fax or leaving a voice-mail message for
someone, find out if the person has an e-mail address first. Sending e-mail is simple and
usually less expensive than faxing, and recipients will often thank you for making their work
easier because they'll be able to use the file you have sent right away, without putting it
through an optical character reader or retyping it. E-mail also provides a complete electronic
file of your correspondence - you don't have to remember to place it in physical folders or
scramble around to find it when you need it. E-mail is no longer the way of the future. It is the
best way to work right now - for business or personal use.

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