RESOURCE CENTRE MANUAL
HEALTHLINK WORLDWIDE
6.6 E-mail services
Electronic mail (e-mail) is a means of sending messages from a computer to one
or more other computers. Messages are sent via a telephone line and delivered to
the recipient within a few seconds, minutes, or hours, to over a day, depending
on the service used and the reliability of the telephone connection. E-mail is a
relatively cheap and increasingly popular way of communicating among
individuals and organisations worldwide.
Different types of connections carry different charges and advantages. A dial-up
connection is the most basic; usually, you are charged for the use of the
telephone line for the duration of your ‘session’ on the Internet, plus connection
charges and/or a standard monthly fee. Alternatively, if you live in an area with a
good telecommunications infrastructure, you may be able to obtain a broadband
(also called DSL (Digital Subscriber Line)) connection. Broadband may be quite
expensive, but provides an ‘always on’, much faster Internet connection and may
be more cost-effective if the Internet is used frequently.
An e-mail message can be a simple text-based message written directly in e-mail
software, or it can include an ‘attachment’ consisting of a word-processed
document, spreadsheet, database or graphics file, or even a software program. A
simple text e-mail can be read by any e-mail software. However, an attachment
can only be read by the same software in which it was prepared. The recipient
therefore needs to have the relevant word-processing, spreadsheet, database or
other software to read attached documents. See also ‘Portable Document Format
(PDF)’, in section 6.3.
TIP: Sending attachments
If you are not sure which word-processing software is used by the
person who is receiving the attachment, save the document as a rich
text format (RTF) file, or a text file (TXT) before sending it. These files
can be read by any word-processing software. A text file only includes
the text of the document with no formatting. A rich text format file
keeps basic formatting such as bold and underline.
E-mail addresses indicate the user, service provider, type of organisation and
(usually) the country in which the user is located. A typical e-mail address is
Healthlink Worldwide’s address: [email protected]
Info = the identifier or user name (this could be the name of an
individual, a department or a service)
@ = pronounced ‘at’
healthlink.org.uk = the domain name or organisation name
org = shows that it is an organisation (ac = academic institution,
co = company, gov = government)
uk = country in which the organisation is registered
12 SECTION 6: COMPUTERS, ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION AND DATABASES