Email, short for electronic mail, is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using computers, tablets or phones. It's an important form of communication used for both professional and personal purposes. Email has some advantages over ordinary mail:
Before you can use email, you need to create an email address for yourself. Just as you can only receive telephone calls if you have a telephone number, you can only send and receive emails if you have an email address. All email addresses have the same format
name@domain
The name is a unique combination of letters and numbers that identifies that this email address belongs to you.
@ (pronounced "at") is a separator between the name and the domain
The domain is the organisation supplying the email address.
For example, John Smith working at ETBI might have the email address jsmith@etbi.ie
jsmith is the name, identifying that this is John Smith's email
etbi.ie is the domain.
There are a few common ways of getting an email address:
Your work, college and your ISP email address will work for you as long as you stay in that job, study at that college or stay with that ISP - if you change your job, graduate college or change your ISP, your email address will be deleted.
Many people use a free email service such as Gmail or Outlook because it's a permanent email address. There is one disadvantage though - if you have a common name (e.g. John Smith) then that name will be already be in use. If your name is already in use, then you'll have to think of some way of creating a unique name. You could use your middle name or initials perhaps or put some numbers after your name, or even use your nickname. So instead of johnsmith@gmail.com, you could be
Just be aware however that if you have a common name, these ideas might not work, and you might have to think a little about your email name. Also, if you'll be using your email for professional purposes (such as job applications), it's advisable to have a professional-looking email address e.g. jzsmith@gmail.com, not cooldude69@gmail.com.
When you create an email account, you will be asked to provide a password to access the account and keep it secure. You will need to use a password that is both easy for you to remember and secure enough so that no-one will be able to guess it. When you create a password:
Each free email provider will do things slightly differently, but the basic principles are the same:
Again, all email providers do things slightly differently, but the same principles apply
Some concepts to describe:
You can write your email any way that you like, but do remember who you're writing to; use language and style appropriate for the purpose; if you're writing to friends or family you can be informal and take lots of shortcuts. If it's a business matter, you should be formal and professional.
Most email platforms have three options for sending to recipients. The To and CC ("Carbon Copy") options work in the same way. Recipients will receive the same email and see the email address of all other recipients. When it comes to email etiquette, the To field is generally used for the main recipients of your email; the people for whom the email is directly intended. The CC field is for sending a copy to other interested parties for their information. As an example, suppose you as a student missed an assignment deadline because you were sick. You would email your tutor directly (using the 'To' field) but you might also send the email to the course supervisor using the 'CC' field.
'BCC' works differently. The B in BCC stands for 'Blind'. Anyone sent a mail by BCC will see the same message as recipients in the 'To' and 'CC' fields and will see the email addresses of those recipients but will not see the email address of anyone sent the message by 'BCC'. In fact, no recipients of the message will see the email addresses of those recipients who have been BCC'd. BCC is used when you want to send a copy of an email to a large number of people. When you place those email addresses in the BCC field, they are invisible to all the recipients of the email, so BCC is useful for protecting the privacy of recipients, who cannot see who else has received the mail by BCC. BCC also protects against unnecessary 'Reply to All' messages.
