Slide 1
Hello again and welcome to COM 333; this our second lecture in the series.  Our topic for this lecture will be Electronic Mail - The Cornerstone of Internet Communication.

Slide 2
The basic components of an email address really are indicated here on your screen.  Normally you read an email address from the left to the right and it normally includes an @ sign and some sort of dot or period.  So for example it would be name@host.domain.firstdomain.  Now in the name you should note that generally there are no spaces.  Occasionally there might be an underline, perhaps even a hyphen, but generally no spaces in that part of the email address which precedes the @ sign.  And of course you have the @ sign and then the host.  The host generally refers to a computer.  And so in this example you could have schroede (first 8 characters of my name) schroede @ eagle (and eagle is a name that we have assigned to a computer) dot domain(and in this case our domain uis) dot first domain or primary domain  --  edu, as in educational institution.  Now you can have a string of sub-domains and it can go on actually quite long.  Generally, one tries to keep ones email address fairly short.  The shorter the email address the easier it is to remember and use.

Slide 3
Domains - I used that term a bit already.  In looking at a domain in an email address the most general or largest domain is to the right of the email address - the most specific to the left, but still, of course, to the right o the @ sign.  Some example of very large domains are com or net, edu, mil, org, gov, uk, jp - those all are domains.  Com stand for a commercial entity, net for a network, edu for an educational institution, mil for military, org for organization, gov for government, uk for United Kingdom, as in England or Great Britain, jp for Japan.  A long list of domains are available to your at this web address indicated on the screen http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/dist-bynum.html.  So, if you go to that address you’ll be able to get an idea of the many domains out there including domains for many of the countries in this world.  Now sometimes you will see the term DNS - domain name server, and I referenced this in our first lecture - I think.  It’s the DNS that translates those names and domains into the IP numbers.  The domain name server will take the domain of an address so that it includes that extension com, edu, net , etc and whatever prior domain like uis, uiuc, etc and translates it into the actual numbers to access the machine that is being referenced.  And of course this is used by routers along the Internet.

Slide 4
SMTP is a very important part of email.  It really is that Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - it’s the main protocol for handling email transmissions.  And it handles the applications between the PC and the network.  It is used for many of the common email applications.  It’s really a set of rules on how email is handled.  The RFC - or request for comment, is a description of the actual protocol itself is available at the address indicated on the screen.  Those original standards for SMTP were approved in 1982.  And it is SMTP that allows messages to be sent from the computer - the micro-computer that you’re working on, whether it be windows machine - out to the internet and by using this protocol you can send messages from a windows machine to a Macintosh machine to a unix, or a linux machine as well.

Slide 5
Now, sometimes your relationship between your machine and your server is controlled by something called POP3.  POP3 is Post Office Protocol # 3 and it is a client-server protocol.  In the case of POP3, email is received and held by your server.  Then you check with your server - your mailbox - and your download the information from you server.  This is a kind of store-and-forward service, POP3.  Eudora and Netscape, for example, use the POP3 protocol.

Slide 6
Well, you also might have your email handled by IMAC - the Internet Mail Access Protocol, which also is a client-server relationship.  Your email is received and held for you by your server, but mail stays on the server until it is deleted.  So you can access the server, check your mail - that is pull mail up from the server and read it, but you must still be connected to the server to manipulate your mail.  Now this is the case with most of those Internet providers that are available on the net.  You know, hotmail and the like.  Many of them use IMAC protocols.  There’s a FAQ, F A Q - frequently asked questions - a FAQ on POP3 and IMAC describing the similarities and differences.  And of course that URL address is listed right there on your screen.

Slide 7
MIME - Well MIME is not the silent one, but rather the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.  And MIME is used for a whole series of applications.  It allows for non-text file attachments to be included in email.  Binary files - that is, not alphanumeric files such as images, if you were to send pictures or word processor documents.  You know, commonly we think of those letters and text that we generate from a word processor as being only text, but there’s a lot more information there than immediately meets the eye.  You know the carriage returns, the bolding of text, the front type, italicizes, etc.  Spreadsheets - also another example of binary files, audio files, video clips, etc, so MIME extensions are used commonly in email, but it’s very important that you be careful about the size of your attachments.  Sometimes people are not careful about the size of images.  You might find a beautiful picture on the Internet and if you attach it in your email - the picture itself might take up over a million bytes of information.  Well, that means when it’s sent, that it may exceed the size of the mailbox or the allocation of space on a server - IMAP or POP3, on the server, for the person who is to receive that email.  So, you might send a picture with the best of intentions and you might in fact crash that email for the person who is receiving it.  So you should be careful about the size of those files that you attach using MIME extensions.

Slide 8
Well, Listserv - I used to refer to listserv as junk mail, but first let me say that listserv seems to be missing that final e as you look at it on the screen.  It’s that odd spelling because of that 8 character limit early-on imposed on some of the computers that were hooked to the Internet and so rather than writing listserve or listserver with an e or er at the end, it was simply truncated as listserv with a v.  Well, I say “junk” mailing list.  I think we’re all familiar with “snail mail”.  That is, paper mail that you receive at the post office or at home and the junk mail you get.  This is much like that in the sense that it has a list of recipients, kind of like those peel off labels on those junk mail envelopes, but most commonly listservs are not junk.  You get to choose whether or not you are put on a listserv.  Now I maintain a little listserv here from our campus.  I use a protocol, rather a program called majordomo, M A J O R D O M O, and so if one were to subscribe to my listserv, one would email to majordomo@uis.edu and then in the subject line one would put nothing, but then in the actual text of the message, one would type subscribe space newtek-l (this is an L not a 1) newtek-l space and then your email address.  Then once you’ve mailed that to majordomo the program would automatically then sends email back to you acknowledging the subscription and you would receive 5 or 6 emails from me a day about new technologies in the electronic media.  Now the newtek listserv that I send out is one in which I as manger of the listserv do all the mailing.  Most listservs allow anyone on the list to send the message to the list.  That is you might have - let’s look small scale first - you might have 10 people on a listserv and each of those could send a message to the given address, let’s say newtek@uis.edu, and the message would go out to the other 9 subscribers.  And so people are able to share their information that way, but sometimes listserv involves not 10’s and 100’s, but rather 1000’s or even 10’s of thousands of subscribers, and so in those cases it becomes important to have a moderator managing the listserv so that we don’t have a thousand emails sent out on a listserv on a given day.  So, the essential thing to know about listservs are that you email to one address and it then in turn sends the message out to many addresses.  On your syllabus, I have a link to liszt, a of kind of a pun on Liszt, the composer; liszt, as in the composer of lists.  And liszt is a site-listing for listservs, and I think there are thousands - actually thousands - of listservs listed and you might find one of interest to you there - almost anything under the sun and beyond the sun, including astronomy, as far as topic for listservs available on the internet.  But beware in case of listservs - beware of overload, because there are some listservs that due in fact send out more than a hundred messages a day, so if you happen to miss your email for a week, you may have a thousand messages and of course you may well then have exceeded the capacity of your mailbox.  It’s really quite a bother to reset all of that.  So, beware and be very selective about what listservs you choose to subscribe to.

Slide 9
Netiquette – well, you know that’s the combination of Internet and etiquette, and it’s etiquette on the internet.  Things that we should be aware of are flaming, trolling and spamming.  Let me talk about those three first.  Flaming is the use of a very derogatory or very negative email message, in the case of a listserv, that makes disparaging remarks about an individual on the list and it’s not uncommon that someone might say something inappropriate on a listserv or someone might take umbrage about what someone had posted on the listserv and then that person will be flamed and it’s not unusual on listserv to see some of that.  It doesn’t particularly add anything positive to the communications.  Trolling - trolling involves the posting of a message which is intended to irritate or anger the audience.  For example - one might have listserv on cat fanciers and so let’s take that for an example.  Cat fanciers might have a listserv and they might share information about their pets.  So someone might jump on the listserv and post a message about drowning little kittens with simply the intent to cause havoc and to irritate people.  That’s trolling, so trolling for some response.  Spamming - I think we’ve heard a lot of spam.  It comes from that term of that ham in the can - you know spam.  And spamming is the sending of commercial messages through a listserv or to usenet groups , which we’ll talk about a little bit later.  Spamming is the use of Internet for this kind of unsolicited commercial information and it’s frowned upon on the Internet.  All three of these flaming, trolling and spamming are to be avoided.  Emoticons are a little bit different in that they’re really kind of fun.  You see the smiley faces commonly made with ascii (that is, alphanumeric) art.  So if you look at that which follows “smilies” on the screen and put your head on your left shoulder - you’ll see a smiley face with kind of a winky right eye (you know the semi colon-hyphen-right parenthesis) turns into a little face with one eye winking.  And there are whole books written on smiley faces - tons of them out there.  There are lots of abbreviations and acronyms are commonly used in email on the Internet: TIA - thanks in advance; LOL - laughing out loud; by the way- BTW; IMHO - in my humble opinion.  And you’ll pick up on some of these and you might have some of your own to add that you might share through our WebBoard.

Slide 10
Well our next step-where to from here.  I want you to visit those links for this week and in particular to go liszt and check out some of those listserv  -perhaps even subscribe to one, but make sure you save the message you get when you subscribe to the listserv - you get a message commonly that tells how to un-subscribe, that is how to sign-off a list, because once you’ve gotten into a list and you’re getting 80-90 email messages a day, it may get old very quickly and you may in fact want to unsubscribe.  So save that first message, so that you can unsubscribe if you need to.  Take a look at that basic guide to emoticons and in particular to netiquette and see some of the basic rules for proper use on the Internet, proper communications, and how people look down on newbies.  You kind of say that through your nose – newbies - new users of the internet.  Anyway take a look at the netiquette file and I’ll talk to you again next week.