Positive And Negative Aspects Of E Mail

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Overview

Human commutation is one of the aspects of life. Back to the old days, people had to write letter if the recipient lives at a distance away. The process of sending a mail or letter can be time consuming that take days or maybe weeks. It wasn’t convenient and efficient if the sender has important message to be delivered immediately.

When came to 20th century, people have finally created Electronic Mail as known as e-mail with the leaping of computer and internet technologies. Unlike the old fashioned mail, people can now send or receive across the globe in just the blink of an eye. Moreover, electronic mail can also attach with multimedia content or even documents. There are some well-known and famous electronic mail service providers such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and etc. Most of them provide electronic mail services with free of charge. Based on the study from Radicati Group in May 2009, there are about 1.9 billion e-mail users in worldwide which means one of five persons on the Earth use e-mail.

History of E-mail

How E-mail Works

Step A: Mail User Agent (MUA)

The MUA is the application the originating sender uses to compose and read email. Sender writes an e-mail in Mail User Agent and send.

Step B: Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)

The Mail User Agent delivers the email to a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). It accepts the email, then routes it to local mailboxes or forwards it if it isn't locally addressed.

Step C: Network Cloud

Email service providers that process a large volume of email often have their own network clouds. These organizations commonly have multiple mail servers and route all email through a central gateway server that redistributes mail to whichever MTA is available. The secondary mail server will transfer its messages to the primary MTA so e-mail on these secondary MTAs must usually wait for the primary MTA to become available again.

Step D: Email Queue

The e-mail is on an email queue with other outgoing email messages. The result will be delayed in the queue if high volume of e-mails or the message is too large until the MTA processes the messages ahead of it.

Step E: The Internet

The e-mail enters the Internet network cloud.In the Internet network cloud, it needs to "stop and ask" directions from the Domain Name System (DNS) in order to identify the next MTA in the delivery chain. The exact route depends on which MTA can be found to accept email for the domain specified in the address.

Step F: Spam and Virus Filters

When an e-mail is passing a firewall, itmay be filters before it is allowed to pass throughthe firewall. These filters check to see if the message classifies as spam or virus. If the message contains virus, the file is usually quarantined and the sender is informed. If the message is identified as spam, it will probably be deleted without giving a notice to the sender.

Positive and Negative Aspects of E-mail

E-mail is definitely one of the best communication tools. Most of the e-mail service providers have user-friendly interface so even the people who don’t know about e-mail can learn to use quickly. Compared to old mail post, e-mail can be delivered to recipient no matter where he/she is just within seconds and without postage fee required. Moreover, e-mail requires no paper at all so it is environment friendly too. E-mail can also send with attachments because people usually have images, videos or even documents to share with recipient.

Although the features of e-mail really bring e, however there are some aspects need to be cautious. First, the recipient must at least have an e-mail account. It’s would be meaningless to send e-mail if the recipient has no e-mail account. Since e-mail is web-based application, internet connection is required. If a person try to send or read e-mail in offline status, that would be impossible to do. Most of the time, user might receive a lot of spammed mails. Some of the mails are like phishing mail and mail that contains virus or hidden Trojan horse program which bring harm to user’s PC.

User Manual

Now, I am going to show how to use e-mail to send or check mail. In this case, I will be using Hotmail as the reference for you.

Since it’s a web-based program, we don’t have to install it on computer. First of all, open a web browser. Type www.hotmail.com on the address bar, it will navigate to Hotmail page. You need a user account to access e-mail services. Please sign up if you don’t have any account.

The sign-up is completely free. Fill in the form respectively with desire address and so on.

This is the page will be shown after logged in the account. In this page, you can go to edit or update your profile by going to "Profile" tab. Right now click on the "Hotmail" tab and proceed to next.

We are now at the interface of Hotmail. I will do some brief explanations about the important parts of this section.

Inbox – Any e-mail that you’ve received will be stored inside Inbox.

Junk – Spammed, Unrecognized or suspicious e-mail will be dropped inside here.

Drafts – Unfinished draft will be saved here for future use.

Sent – Allows you to trace back the e-mail that who you’ve sent to.

Deleted – Any e-mail you’ve deleted will be moved here for temporarily. You still can recover the wanted e-mail before it erases itself for permanently after a few days.

New folder – Allows you to create own favorite folder to store specific e-mail in organized way.

Now I opened a mail to view the content. You can reply from here without create a new one to do that. Besides that, you can even forward this mail to another person(s). Please note that some e-mail may contain virus. Make sure the mail comes from trusted and verified sender.

If you want to send an e-mail, go to "New" tab. Type in the recipient’s e-mail address ([email protected]) and write the purpose of this mail on the "Subject". It can be blank but would be wise to put your purpose just in case that people might think this is a spammed mail or virus contained and then ignore the mail. We can also attach e-mail with images, video or documents at the same time by clicking attachments, office docs or photos. It takes time to upload if the attachments are large. Unless your internet is really fast. Click "send" if you’re done and wish to send the e-mail. If you wish to continue the message next time, you can save the message and look after at "Drafts".

Conclusion

The invention of e-mail makes human communication closer. It’s fast, convenient, efficient and ease to use. Besides that, e-mail also available in mobile phone and tablet.

The security needs improvement to grant protection from some people who try to spread and send the spammed or virus e-mail. This can prevent some users who might not aware of this from opening this kind of mails. Do not simply share e-mail address to unknown people as well in case they might send disturbing and inappropriate e-mail.