Using this Document

These notes and exercises are provided to assist you with becoming familiar with email. You will develop most of the skills described in this document by simply using the software, reading the screen and trying the menus. These notes then provide background reading to the skills you gain by playing with the tools.

The notes are written to be independent of particular email software but Eudora is used as the working example because it is a very commonly used one and is provided as the supported email software by many Internet Service Providers.

These notes should be used in conjunction with the email checklist.

Mail Concepts

The use of email involves many new terms and concepts which may be unfamiliar to you. This activity will give you a chance to check your understanding of the terms and concepts of email. This is not an online investigation. The mail program Eudora will be used as an example but the concepts are generic to any email software.

Important ideas about Off-line mailreaders

• Off-line mail programs (eg Eudora) mean that you can log onto your service provider, collect your mail and log off. When you are off-line you can still use the mail software to queue up new messages along with replies to existing messages. When you have finished your message creation and filing, you can log in again and send the messages away.

• Software written for a Windows environment can be operated by using the mouse to pull down the menus at the top of the screen or by using the keystroke shortcuts (see the right hand side of the menu items eg "CTRL+C" is equivalent to "Cut") to invoke the same actions.

• Mail programs usually have some way of storing mail in 'boxes' or 'folders'. There will be some default arrangement of boxes when you first use your mail program as well as a mechanism for creating new mailboxes. Eudora stores mail in boxes which can be organised into groups or folders. Eudora has three boxes automatically available:- the In box; the Out box and the Trash box. All mail will go into the In box until you store it (ie Transfer it elsewhere)

• Most software will give you some way of keeping copies of mail that you send. Eudora will keep copies of all your 'sent-mail' in your Out Mailbox if the switches on Eudora are set to do this (you can check this by checking the Settings under the Tools/Options menu

Activities

Look through all the menu options in your mail program. Although some of the terms may be a mystery at first you will soon become accustomed to them and the ideas behind them.

• checking mail (reading new mail)

• printing a message

• replying to a message

• switching between mailboxes

• configurations and switches
  (may be called options or preferences in some programs)

Questions

1. How can you set up new mailboxes or folders for your mail?

2. How can you store people's email addresses?

3. How do you move messages from one mailbox to another?

4. Why might you want to save a mail message as a file?

5. How can you set up a signature that will automatically be attached to your email messages?

6. Can you see how to turn your signature off when you don't want to use it?

Understanding Addresses

Problem

Internet addresses look very complex. Are they? How do you know how to address a person, two or more people or a list? This is not an investigation to do online.

Important ideas

• Most email addresses have a similar format regardless of what the object is that you are addressing (a person's email address, a list name or some other object)

• usually addresses are written in the form
  <name>@<hostname>

  (in computing the angled brackets can be read as "some sort of" so the format or syntax of an email address is "some sort of username" @ "some sort of hostname")

• addresses can be complicated by the use of aliases (synonyms) for address parts

• email addresses are not case sensitive

• addresses can be best understood by reading them backwards. Your email address gives all the information that is needed for people to contact you from anywhere in the world, just like the address you might put on an envelope.

• in general they have the format
  • Name@domainname.organisation.country
    
  • Name@domainname.subdomainname.organisation.country
    

  examples of addresses of people

  • Fsmith@hotmail.com.au
  • Fred.Smith@company.org.uk
  • D1089@ozemail.com.au

• Let's examine one of these addresses
  boweja@asgard.clare.tased.edu.au
  which has the form:
  
  name@
  machine.
  provider_subdomain.
  provider_domain.
  provider_classification.
  country
  

  With our example (working backwards):
  

  au- represents the country network Australia
  edu - represents the provider classification. "com" stand for commercial. State Education Systems (and other) belong to the classification "edu". Others you might see are "gov" (Government), "org" (Organisation), "net" (network)
  tased - represents the provider of the provider (Tasmanian Education Department)
  clare - represents subdomain of the provider (Claremont College)
  asgard - the name of the machine that handles the mail
  @ - separates the name of the person from the domain details
  boweja - represents the account name the user uses to log in or a mail address which substitutes for that

• If you want to mail the same message to several people, you usually separate the email addresses by commas

• If you want to send email to a LIST (ie a discussion list that is managed by listserver software), you can email to the list name and everyone on the list will receive your message. Without being told, it is usually not possible to determine whether an email address is a person's address or a list name address. The list that you are all familiar with is the voced-coord list.
  Its address is:
  voced-coord@rite.ed.qut.edu.au

Activities:

1. Write down your own email address and identify the parts of it

2. Start keeping an address book of email addresses you use frequently. You can do this in traditional form or from inside your mail software

3. Sometimes you may want to create a distribution list so that you can email a group of people without having to type their individual addresses eg if you are a teacher you may want a distribution list for your class or if you are a voc-ed coordinator you may want a distribution list for your management committee (assuming they all have email). In Eudora this is done in the Nicknames section. Most other email software uses the term "distribution list" so a browse through the menus or accessing the help files should point you in the right direction. Write down some distribution lists that would be useful for your purposes.

4. When you have covered the "distribution lists" activities think about the ways in which lists are different to distribution lists. Write down some pros and cons for each. You may need to discuss this with someone else in the workshop.

Lists Concepts

Important Ideas

• an email list (sometimes referred to as a listserv) is an email based facility to which individuals 'subscribe'. Subscribing involves sending a particular email message (no money!) to a special address. Once subscribed, the individual will automatically receive any messages that are sent (or 'posted') to the list

• lists can be thought of as a group of people who have similar interests though they don't necessarily agree with each other. In technical terms lists are a group of email addresses collected together with the one list name

• lists are used in a variety of ways and can be represented as either a simple mailing device or as a community of people who share similar interests by chatting on the lists

• lists deliver email to your mailbox

• by mailing to a list address you send email to every person on the list
  eg if you send a message to
  voced-coord@rite.ed.qut.edu.au
  it will go to everyone who has subscribed to the voced-coord list

• a list may be monitored through a moderator (a human being!) and thus can be moderated or it may be unmoderated. If a list is moderated then every message sent to the list goes via the moderator for approval. The voced-coord list is not moderated

• a list may be closed or open. With a closed list, subscriptions must be approved by the list owner whereas with an open list, anyone can subscribe. The voced-coord list is an open list.

• lists have a list owner or manager (human being) whose responsibility it is to deal with situations that are not automatically handled by the listserv software. If a list is moderated then the moderator would usually also be the list owner. It is possible for a list to have more than one owner ('list owner' is the technical term but the role is more one of management - lists are usually "owned" by their members)

• lists are managed by a list robot - a piece of software which takes care of lists automatically for humans. There are two main robot types - listservs and majordomos. At present the voced-coord list is on the RITE server at QUT which uses a robot called Lyris.

• you can send email to the Lyris address to find out what lists exist on that computer, if you are a member of a particular list and to obtain a complete listing of all the majordomo commands

• Lyris software expects the Subject field of email it receives to be blank and will only obey commands it knows. If you send Lyris a strange request or mistype a command, it will send you back an error message.

Using Mailing Lists

1. The first process involves using the list management software for tasks such as subscribing and unsubscribing, getting help, and finding out who is on the list.
2. The second process is actually mailing to all the list members.

1. Using the list management software.

You must subscribe to and unsubscribe from the list by sending a message to a computer program on the computer that hosts the list. This will be a Lyris, majordomo, listserv, listproc or mailserv. So the address for subscribing and unsubscribing will be different to the address used to send mail to all the other subscribers. For example, to join voced-coord, you send the message to:

The message usually consists of the word subscribe and the name of the list. In most cases this is sent in the body of the message and the subject line is left blank. However, occasionally, the message is sent in the subject line.

When you subscribe, the program generates a message telling you that you have joined the list. You will receive some sort of welcome message that will tell you about the list and how to unsubscribe. This may take a few minutes to arrive. File this message as you will need the instructions contained in it when you wish to leave the list. The welcome message may also provide information about how to use the particular list, eg

2. Mailing to the list members.

Sending messages:

After subscribing, you address your mail to the listname at the address of the host. eg

To: voced-coord@rite.ed.qut.edu.au

(voced-coord is the list name and the host address is rite.ed.qut.edu.au)

Replying to messages

When you reply to a message you need to choose whether to reply to the list or to the individual. The list will be set up to automatically do one or the other. Note:You need to look in the To: field of the message header and change it if appropriate.

Lurking on lists

People often like to lurk on lists (listen in without contributing) until they feel comfortable in the space. Whether this matters or not is really dependent on the purpose of the list.

If the purpose of the list is to build an online community then it is important that there is a rich variety of interaction - not just the same few vocal people all the time. There is nothing wrong with lurking to get a feel for the "list culture" but joining lists and lurking indefinitely defeats the purpose of the community whose strengths will come from the contributions of a diverse range of people.

Important note - Newsgroups and Bulletin Boards
You may have heard or read about Internet newsgroups. Lists are not the same as newsgroups. They are similar in that they look a bit like email and can have communities of people who take part in discussions. However they are quite different in that the discussions are public and are not delivered to your mail box. You have to visit a newsgroup to read it and use special software (a newsgroup reader) to look at it.