E- mailing

Email is a lot older than the internet. When e-email was first invented it was very simple and easy to use people would leave messages on another person’s directory in a spot where they could see it when they logged in. you can compare this as to leaving a note on someone’s desk. The first type of email system was the ‘MAILBOX’ which was used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There was another type of programme that sent messages to other people; this was called ‘SNDMSG’. Ray Tomlinson was an internet investigator who worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor. In 1972 Ray Tomlinson became well known for inventing email. Tomlinson chose the ‘@’ symbol to denote sending messages from one persons computer to another persons computer. When people were on the internet and needed to sign into their email address you would simply enter: name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer. Email is very common these days and nearly every person in the UK has a email address. People who may use e-mails are:
Teachers
Teachers use emails to contact other students or to receive important notifications from other members of staff.
Businesses
Businesses use e-mails to advertise their products and sales. Also lots of business people use e-mails to contact clients or other members of staff who are in the same businesses as them and are part of the same company but there in different locations. E-mailing is a quicker way of getting a message to someone important.
Friends
Friends may use e-mailing to keep in contact with other friends who have moved away. Also most students who go to school have a school e-mail address so they can send work to themselves and others etc if their email server (i.e- Hotmail, AOL) is blocked from the school networking site.
Family
Family members often use e-mails to connect to other family members who live far away. Email is a cheaper and quicker way of speaking to your family if they live abroad or just very far away.

Advantages
- Emails can be sent 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
- Webmail means emails can be received and sent globally by any computer that has internet connection.
- It is cheaper than calling people abroad.
- Emails can be sent to several people at a time.
- Reduces the waste of paper.
- It is more effective.
- It is good to make appointments with work colleagues who are busy with a hectic work schedule.
Disadvantages - There is no guarantee that the mail will be read until the user logs on.
- Spam mail can be an issue for email users.
- Viruses are also seen as a limitation as most viruses can attack your computer.
- E-mails are not very personal.
- E-mails could also be seen as being more time consuming.
- Sensitive information can be easily distributed either purposely or accidently.
- The e-mail may become impersonal or misunderstood; this could cause tension in the work place.

Personal Experiences My personal experience with e-mailing has been positive as well as negative. I have had my email account since I was the age of 12 and therefore have a lot of junk and un-opened emails on my account which can become very annoying. The majority of the time Hotmail informs me that my mailbox is almost full. If my mailbox does become full I will not be able to receive any emails until I go through all of them and delete them, this is very time consuming as I have over 2000 emails on my account that I would need to delete. However, I have had a positive experience of using emails. When I go to enter someone’s email address in the space to send it Hotmail notify me if it is wrong by marking it in red and showing a red cross next to it, this is helpful to me because then I know that person has given me their wrong email address.