How To Walk In High Heels: The Girl's Guide To Everything (27 page)

The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Before this you could only send messages to users sharing the same machine, so Post-it notes would have been more appropriate. His email was a breakthrough worthy of a full-choir chorus of Handel’s
Messiah
’s ‘Hallelujah!’ He worked out how to send messages to other machines on the internet using the @ sign to identify who the receiver was. Emails are the computer’s answer to the text message, and the most exciting invention since Alexander Graham Bell’s first ring (he was the guy who invented the telephone in 1876).

We’ve come a long way since then. Now broadband is a popular option when using email or the internet as you can be on the telephone and able to send and receive emails without the whole put-the-phone-down-dial-up-internet-connect drama. It uses the same dial-up network but it allows you greater speed and memory capacity. Telephone lines break down the message into signals, and intonation, and send at 50K images per second. Without sounding too much like an advert, broadband is able to send them at 1 million per second – that is twenty times as fast as the dial-up method! The faster it’s sent, the more, surely, you can receive!

What happens when you send an email is a message travels down the phone line. It is sent into space and is delivered to the cyber address of the recipient. You can send an email to anyone in the world, providing you have the correct address for them. And unlike posted mail and parcels, each email can be sent to anyone, anywhere in the world, same price, same second.

This is what the address format looks like:
[email protected]

In the example
[email protected]
the email is going to Jane, who is at ‘Fashion’, a company in the UK (@ is read AT).

You can often decipher and decode where the mail has come from:

.com usually is an American based company/address

.it is Italy

.fr is France

.jp is Japan

.nl is Holland

.de is Germany

.org.uk is a non-profit-making organisation/charity in the UK

.gov.uk is a government department or agency in the UK (.gov is the US as they got there first)

.net originally means that this is connected to a large internal network

.tv was an attempt to indicate sites suitable only for broadband (lots of large content, movies, images and music) but it hasn’t caught on massively yet.

Getting an email account

Nowadays there are many ways to get an email account. The general way is to go to the website of your chosen service provider, select the option to ‘set up an email account’ and follow the instructions. Service providers can be of the specific communications provider type (Telewest, BT, etc., etc. in the UK) or the more general Hotmail/Yahoo/Lycos kind, which you access via Internet Explorer.

Send and receive an email

Sonnets and scribbled love letters seem to have become a thing of the past. But not to worry, you can still be wooed; and now that you can get emails instantaneously from all the corners of the globe, you can have a suitor in every city. Make HOTmail live up to its name. Imagine how it would have improved Romeo and Juliet’s chance of a long-distance thing.

Have a package or application so you can connect to the server and send your message. If you don’t have broadband you will need to have a modem which will connect your computer to the phone line so that your message can get posted onto the ‘server’ – the cyber-space postal system – sorted and delivered to the relevant party.

There are two ways to send your email. One is using the internet browser, which is accessed via the website, e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo, aol. The other option is to use an email application such as Outlook Express, where you write your emails then log on – dial up – to send the mail and receive any post.

To send and receive you simply have to locate the icon of an envelope on your computer screen and click on it. This will open Outlook Express, or whatever your mail access is. On Macs, Quick Mail can be identified by a circled Q, or by a symbol resembling a paper aeroplane.

Click on Send and Receive box and, as the name implies, you will send and receive your mail.

The most important requirement to send or receive an email is that you know the address you wish to contact. Well that, and also to have your own email account and address from which you can send and receive.

Set up group email

Okay, so you know how to send a one-on-one email, but sometimes you want to send the same email to more than one person. This can be either business, and you cover yourself by sending it to all and sundry, or when you are hosting celebrations, and have a lot of people to invite.

First, write the main message, a snappy subject line, and add attachment, if desired.

Click on the To button.

Write in first email address. Even better, you may have saved this in your address book. (This is an easy and sensible thing to do with friends and regulars in your Inbox. If you have a name added to your address book you only need enter the first letter of the name and the computer will suggest possible saved email addresses. You can then click on appropriate name and send.)

For a second name/recipient click once again on the To line of your email, and another line should appear below. You can now continue the entire process until you have included all the required readers/ recipients.

If you need regularly to email the same group of people, e.g. friends or work colleagues, you can save the group of names and title it. That way, when you click on To you can select Friends and all their email addresses should pop into the To box. Voilà!

CC
: This is the place you put an email address when you want someone to see the email, but it is just for their information, and not addressed to them. You also want your recipient to see that you have included them. So it’s a good idea to CC your boss when you are getting into hot water and you want to keep yourself in the clear.

BCC
(Blind CC): This is where you place the address of someone you want to see the email, but not let the recipient see that you have included them in the email. Cunning. BCC does not show up in the recipient’s Inbox. Well it shouldn’t – but don’t take any chances by saying anything too inflammatory.

Have you got gmail or ichat?

From google comes gmail, a free service to compete with hotmail.com, with a host of additional features. When you click on ‘reply’ all the emails attached to your ‘conversation’ will be shown. It also offers to display sidebars with links to relevant web pages, and send you alerts when there is news about a favourite subject.

If you own a Mac you will have ichat. This icon means instant messaging, that can also be audio or visual (providing you have a camera or the inclination to use isight). This is a way of using the web to chat with no extra charge. If reducing your phone bill sounds appealing you can register for Skype at
www.skype.com

How to send an attachment

Write your email as normal, ‘Dear Ethel, blah, blah, blah . . .’ and in your cover letter mention there is an attachment with your email (this way the receiver will know to look out for one, and will be able to contact you if none arrives, or they can’t open it). A paperclip symbol on the email means that you have successfully attached your document.

When sending attachments consider the recipient, and how long it will take to download. If it’s over 1MB divide it into more manageable chunks – otherwise the receiver will be trying to fit the equivalent of a grand piano through a letterbox.

Click on the Add Attachment or Insert File box and your recently used files should open. Select relevant file(s) and select Choose, click and then send mail as normal.

The technique for opening attachments varies on each set-up, but you can easily identify them on your email as they are normally represented by a paperclip symbol.

An email is basically nothing more than a cover letter, so the attachment is the main document. In document form you can control the font and the layout of the text, whereas in an email it can get jumbled into a standard non-fancy format.

Attachments allow you to send pictures, spreadsheets and text that are not corrupted by the system.

Word is fairly universal and successful as an attachment format, but some computers cannot translate certain files. What a computer will do is look at the type of file it is receiving, and identify it by the letters appearing after the full stop. It will then automatically apply what it understands to be the correct decoder, for example: .doc – text file, .jpg – image file. (A jpeg see earlier.)

Many computers can manage without all file extensions to open most attachments. They ‘ad lib’ just like we would, but in a technical way. One file Macs do not recognise, however, and never will is .exe which is a Windows application, so avoid that one.

If you are sent an unrecognised file to a Mac, ask for it either to be emailed to someone you know who has a PC, or sent as Cut and Paste.

Love Cut and Paste

This is great for when, however many times you click on the Attachment symbol, it will not ‘Open Sesame’. Never mind. It may be either a hoax or a virus, so delete, or if you really do want to read the text, play the game, or see the photo of your friend’s latest conquest, call them and ask them to send it again, either in a different format or as a Cut and Paste.

To perform your own Cut and Paste simply click on Edit in the file you want to send, scroll down your options and choose to Select All. The text should now all be highlighted. Click on Copy, and then move the pointer into an email for the intended. Here you select Paste (in the email software, not the original one). The entire content will be then ‘pasted’ into the body of the email – some of your clever layout may be lost, but at least it will be readable.

How to have netiquette

This is email etiquette.

When writing your emails always think of how your email will read, how your voice will sound and how your words come across.

Emails are most often written in a very colloquial, informal way, but this does not mean you should forget to punctuate, or neglect good grammar and spelling.

Think of your intonation and your key points, and try not to waffle. Anyway your wrists will get tired and achy if you type too much.

CAPITALS MEANS THAT YOU ARE SHOUTING!

Swear words and expletives can get stopped by scans and company firewalls so are worth avoiding, especially in the email title. Think of other ways to express your rage.

it maybe trendy to ignore capitals and write everything in lower case, but – Pah! Show them you have had a proper education. Similarly slang, such as ‘C U 2morrow’, is as unbearable as fingernails on a blackboard. All ‘emoticons’ (email text abbreviations) should be banned.

CAPITALS and crappy punctuation not only make things harder to read, but could make it harder for you to be taken seriously.

You have a space key, so use it. Edit your choice of words. There is no space restriction so lay things out nicely.

Always use the spell check. It is one of the greatest and most unappreciated inventions ever. (But also always check that your spell check uses the same language as the one that you have written in . . . American English and English English are different.)

Finally, think twice before you hit Send and Receive. Re-read your mail.

Never send poison mails, they will come back to haunt you. Never, ever, join in on a chain email; you will never win millions, and you may have just opened Pandora’s box to viruses and all sorts.

Send emails safely

No. Emails are not dangerous. Mostly you will only receive emails addressed to you, from names you know; junk mail and other nuisances are easy to delete. Chat rooms on the internet require you to be careful. The age of chivalry is not totally extinct, but close. As the internet and email get ever more popular there are increasing horror stories of people assuming fake names in chat rooms, or sending viruses. Rule of thumb: if an email is from a name you don’t recognise, or expect, don’t open the attachment as this could be a virus. Likewise, if you meet someone in a chat room err
slightly
on the cautious side. Don’t agree to elope to Timbuktu, or give them access to your life savings, until you have at least met (in public place first time) and checked they are who they say they are.

Is Big Brother watching you?

Before you go into extraordinary details of a hot affair, how you deal with internal politics, or exactly how you got your promotion by demonstrating a few pole-dancing techniques, a word to the wise: office emails can be monitored and tapped into by internal systems and God only knows who. If you want to keep your private life PRIVATE try code, Hotmail or discretion. Politicians have crumbled, marriages have hit the rocks, and faces have gone more than a healthy shade of red when secrets have been spilled.

How to sit in front of your screen

Posture, posture, posture.

Don’t sit slouched over your computer all day; you will either end up looking like Quasimodo, or have dreadful neck/shoulder/back problems.

Make sure that your screen is at eye level and the keyboard is around waist height. A curse of the laptop is that it causes either slouching shoulders or eye strain. Another tip to remember with a laptop if using it for more than thirty minutes, is to invest in wristbands because it does get scaldingly hot to the touch; and never balance it on your lap for same reason.

Back to the positioning: elbows should be tight to the body, shoulders back, and wrists resting lightly on the keyboard. Ideally you should have your feet flat on the floor or on a small footstool, to ensure your back can remain in a straight upright position. Some people place cushions behind their lower back for additional support. Another good idea is to make sure that you have a supportive and comfortable chair, at the correct height.