Introduction to Emailing

Introduction to Emailing

Instructor: Jonathan Barkand (412-655-8447)

Email is the reason most people get the Internet. Email is just a part of the Internet. When you sign up with an Internet service provider they usually give you an email address. Such as Aol, AT&T, Netzero, Stargate. Each email program is basically the same, because email doesn’t differ from company to company. The only differences you will notice are, how some of the features are used and where they are located. Another thing you should know is that that the email program we are going to use is called a web-based email. It’s called that because you have to go to a web site before you can view your mail. This way of emailing has its benefits. One benefit is that you can be anywhere in the world and view your email, all you need is a connection to the Internet.

I have created three demo accounts with a free email company. The reason it’s free is because of advertisements. The company is called mail.com and I chose this email because it is one of the better free Internet companies out there and it allows more personal email addresses. These accounts are for this class and if we have time at the end of class we will create our own.

We will now open Internet explorer, do this by double clicking on the internet explorer icon (blue letter E). Once Internet explorer has opened, click once in the white area beside the word addresses or you can click on the small paper with a blue letter e on it, it’s directly to the right of address. Press backspace on the keyboard to clear the words. We will now type This is the site you would have to go to every time you want to check your email. The page is relatively straight forward, if you’re a member you type your member name and password and click “log in”, if you want to sign up, you click “new member sign up”.

We are going to log in to our demo accounts, and by demo accounts I mean I created them for this class, these accounts are exactly the same as the real thing. First you must click once in the white rectangle below full email address. Once you have done that you will see flashing vertical line in the box, we can now type our email address, I will give each of you one of these accounts, , and . The symbol between your demo name and mail is called the “at” symbol and it is created by holding the shift key and pressing the number 2, if you look above the number you will see the symbol we are trying to create. After you have typed the email address, click once in the white box below the word password. Our password is “teach”, please type teach now. As you type you will notice you cannot see the words you are typing. This is a security feature, if someone knows your password they can access your account and do anything they want. You should never tell anyone your password. Once you have finished typing the password click once on the word that says, “GO” or press enter on the keyboard.

Features

Email:

By placing your cursor over the word “Email” you will a drop down list of choices. The first choice is “Check Email”, this is one way to get to your inbox and check your messages. The next choice is “Compose New Message”, this gives us a blank document window to type our message also if you look inside the main window you will see a button that says “Compose”. The next choice is “folders”, the sub-folders are the important ones. The first sub-folder is “inbox”, the inbox is where all your received messages are located, also if you look in the main window you will see a button that says either “View Inbox” or “old messages” by clicking on that you will also go to the “inbox”. The next sub-folder is “sent mail”; the sent mail folder holds all of your messages you have sent. The next sub-folder is “draft”, the draft folder is used to hold messages that you have not finished typing but have saved to finish later. The final folder is “trash”, the trash folder holds your messages you have deleted, and when you log out your trash folder is emptied. The “personal folders” is not important, but can be used if you want to organize your messages.

Address Book:

The next choice is the “Address book”, the address book holds all the email address’s you have put in it. By placing your cursor over the word “Email” you will a drop down list of choices.

Options:

The next choice is “options”; the options choice allows us to change minor parts of our email.

My Account:

The “My Account” choice allows us to view the information about our account. Such as username and password hint questions.

Logout:

The final choice is “logout”, logout leaves your email, you always want to log out of your account.

Inbox, Deleting Junk Mail, and Getting Messages

We are now going to delete all the junk mail from our inbox. Please click on the link that says “inbox”. You will see many messages that we don’t want. There is a small white square beside all the messages, click in the all the squares except for the messages from Jonathan Barkand, you will see a checkmark after you click in the box, if you accidentally checkmark and box, just click on the box again and the checkmark will be gone. After you have a check in the boxes, scroll down till you see the button that says delete, press delete. All the messages we deleted are now in our “trash” and if we logout they will be gone forever. Since we already have the inbox open we will talk about that first. At the top of the page you will see the word inbox and beside that you will see how many messages you have and how many of them are unread(new). You can tell which message is new because the person it’s from will appear in bold letters. Starting from the left we can see who the message is from, what the subject is, when it was received and the size of the document. To view the message you have to click on the word or word in the subject area. This is were email programs differ, to view a document you sometimes must click on the person its from, the subject or even a button that says read, you will know which one you have to click on because it will be the link. We are now going to click on the choice that has the subject “attachments”. You will notice that this email has attachments because of the “Paperclip” next to the message. This is a message I sent you. Now let’s assume you would like to add me to your address book, because you might want to send me a message. To add my email to your address book, you have to click on the choice that says “save address”. You will then see an area that allows you to add personal information about the person. The first choice is alias name, first click in the area beside alias name and type Jonathan. All you ever need to enter an address in the book, is alias name and email, the other information is optional. To complete the process scroll down and click on the button that says, “add contact”. After you click that you will then go back to your message. There is another feature called block sender. If you get a lot of annoying email from someone you can block them. Please click on block sender. To block me all you have to do is click block sender but we are not going to block me so press the back button in the upper left. The next area you should see is the “To” area, this is all the people that received this email, you can send to more than 1 person simply by separating there names with a coma. The next is “Cc” this is hardly ever used, the next feature you can’t see, but its called “Bcc” is stands for blind carbon copy. This is used in business settings when you want to send an email to a person and not let the other people you send it to know. Whoever’s name is in the Bcc area the “To” people will never know they received that message. The Next few features are the tricky ones, reply, reply all and forward. Reply simply replies the message to the person, usually the original message will be at the bottom of the message. Reply all, replies to all the people in the “To” area. Now forward is the difficult one. Beside forward you will see a choice area with a downward facing triangle please click it. You will then see the choices “as attachment” and “as inline text”. As attachment means that when you send this email to more people the original message, the one you are reading right now, will be put into a attachment and sent to them, this causes problems because if you do not type any message, the people will receive a blank message with a attachment. Also if a picture is already attached to this email, you will technically be sending a attachment of text, with a picture attachment with it, so that would be 2 attachments you would have to open before you can see the picture. Usually the best choice for forwarding messages is “inline text”. This just puts the original message at the bottom of your email message, just like reply only you can select new people to send this too. And if there is a picture attached it will be sent exactly the same way you received it, but you can put in your own message to go along with it.

Attachments

Please click on “Check Email” and click on the email with the subject “attachments”. This is a message with an attachment; an attachment is a message with a picture or document attached to it. All attachments must be opened before you can view them. A word of caution never open an attachment unless you know the person its from. Attachments from people you don’t know could contain virus’s that could destroy your computer. At the bottom of the message you should see the word Yamaha Motorcycle.Jpg, click on the link. In most cases you will get a preview of pictures. This is where some email programs will differ, some you have to click on a paperclip or a picture that says, “get attachment”. But no matter what you need to get a window asking you what you would like to do with this file, we are going to click in the circle beside “open this file from its current location”. Then click on “ok”. This is the most common choice because everybody wants to see what it is before they save it, and even then if you like the picture you can save it within the program. Your computer will then load a picture-viewing program and display this file for you. That is how you view a picture without saving it on your computer. If you like the picture or document you can then save it, to do this first click on “File”, then on save as, you will then get a new window asking use where we want to save it to. Please save it in the my documents folder, click on the downward facing triangle beside the area “save in” and then press save, because the name we want to use is already typed in the file name area. The document is now saved to your computer. With the picture saved on your computer, you can look at it anytime or even send it to another person; you could also start a collection of pictures. We are also going to look at a document. Next Click the link for “Introduction to Emailing.doc”, please click on it, when the window opens click in the white circle beside “open file from its current location” and press ok. The program Microsoft Word will open and you can read the contents of that document.

Sending Attachments and Messages

We are now going to learn how to send our own messages and attachments. Please click on “Compose”. We now have a blank message window. The first thing you must do before you write the message is to pick who to send it to. If your going to send the message to people already in your address book, all you have to do is click the “address book” link. Then you should have a new window appear, with the names of all the people you entered in your book. Then you just put a dot in the circle of the people you want to send this message to. Then scroll down and click on the button “ok”, and all the emails you chose should appear in the “to” area. Close the address book when you are done. If the email of the person you want to send to is not in your address book, you just have to click in the “to” area and type their full email. You can also send a message to multiple people by separating the email addresses with comas. The next thing we must do is give this message a subject, this is sometimes the hardest thing. We are going to send an attachment, so in the subject area we are going to type attachment, please click in the text area and type “attachment”. You can also change the color your text or do different formatting with the buttons and choices below. The next thing we must do is type the body paragraph, all you do is click in the text box and begin typing, if you want to change your text, its best to do so before you start typing. It doesn’t matter what you type so type anything. Finally we can attach something to our email. Now we are going to attach a picture, because those are the most common types of attachments. Click the word “Attach”, this will sometimes be shown as a paperclip with some systems. Click “browse”, we have to select the file we want to attach, so we will attach the motorcycle picture we saved. We then go to where we saved the picture, most commonly pictures are saved in the “my documents” folder. After you find the file, you must double click it. Our next step is click on the button that says, “attach”, please click it now. The page will reload and you can scroll down to the message and you will see your attachment in the area under the word attachment. You can attach multiple files by repeating the process. You can then press the “DONE” button. We can now send this, please click the send button at the bottom of the page. We will see our inbox again and at the top of the page see the message “your mail has been sent”

Options

We are now going to change some of the options in our email. Please click on the link that says “options”. Once that opens we are going to click on “preferences”. Once that opens you will see many different preferences. We are not going to change anything with the header display. But how many messages per page is useful. If we choose the choice 50 or unlimited it means that we can see many messages per page, but the downside is your inbox will take awhile to load. If you choose 10 then you mailbox will load fast, but you will have to move from page to page. Sorting messages is simple; the best choice is descending just for convenience purposes. The “attach original mail when replying” is a choice of yours. What that means is that when you reply to someone, their message will be at the bottom of your message. The usefulness of that feature is that you can see what they sent you, if they asked you a question you can answer it, also the person that sent you the message may not remember what question they asked you, and have no idea what you are answering. But if you use the reply feature often and you don’t like having to delete the original message it is best to click on the white circle beside do not attach. The next preference of value is the “save copy of outgoing mail is sent folder”. This feature saves a copy of your message in your sent folder, the usefulness of this is if the person your sending to says that you didn’t send them the message you can just go in your sent mail folder and see for yourself, and if you want to send it again you can just click on it and send it again. The only downside to this is that it takes up space in your mailbox and you will have to go through and delete some messages. The empty trash on logout should be on “yes” just because it’s easier to have the computer empty the trash for you. After you have made your changes you would click on update, but we didn’t make any changes so you don’t have to worry about that. Would you please click on “cancel”.