10 Things to Know About E-Mail
1. Backup. Like everything else that’s important on your computer, you must backup important e-mails and contacts. There are features in Outlook and other e-mail clients that will do this for you.
2. Protection. You can get viruses via e-mail, and you can be scammed. Make sure you have virus scanning that is capable of scanning e-mails – don’t rely on your e-mail provider to do this for you!
3. Reliability. E-mail is similar to regular mail in the fact that sometimes your mail won’t arrive or send. Check that your mail is not just sitting in the outbox.
4. Sizes. You need to check the size of e-mails, are you trying to send a huge attachment and it’s taking hours to leave? Or is someone trying to send you a huge attachment that grinds your internet connection to a halt?
5. Online viewing. Most Internet Service Providers (ISP) offer online web mail – you can go onto their site and check your mail. This is useful for deleting those e-mails with huge attachments and for viewing your e-mails from any computer in the world with an internet connection.
6. Offline e-mail. You don’t have to be online to type out your e-mails if you use programs such as Outlook. You can type out your e-mail, attach a picture maybe, and send the next time you log on or download your e-mails, disconnect and read them offline.
7. Accounts. Your ISP will provide you with an e-mail address, or multiple e-mail addresses and you can use Outlook Express (or similar) that will download your e-mail for you. You can also use the web to get good free e-mail accounts such as MSN Hotmail. These accounts are completely free and have contact lists and folders to store e-mails in too.
8. Management. Leaving many old e-mails in your inbox will make it very slow, especially if you have e-mails with large attachments. Hitting delete on an e-mail doesn’t delete it, it puts it in the deleted e-mails folder. If it is taking a long time to access your inbox, delete e-mails or store them in other folders (you can create folders to hold e-mails) and make sure you clear your deleted e-mails folder.
9. Spam. You can get programs that allow you view your e-mail before you download it onto your computer. These programs allow you to view your e-mail and delete them straight from the mail server. Some also allow you to ‘bounce’ back e-mails to the sender, especially useful for bouncing back spam mail.
10. Awareness. If you have Microsoft Windows, you will have Outlook Express, a program that can get e-mail for you already. If you can dial into the internet, an e-mail account is available for you and you can send/receive e-mails.
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