Email

For many people, emailing someone is just a part of their every day life. With a simple email account name, you can sit and send messages to friends and family, attaching images which you can show them within seconds of receiving, or email a co-worker an important document or PowerPoint needed for a meeting. That same email account name can then set up accounts for various websites, including this one right here. Email is a fundamental aspect of and to think, the first email was sent just 40 years ago by a man named Ray Tomlinson, who was working for a defense department at the time, whilst experimenting with a program they used to send notes to each other on a single computer. It works by using two different things which are able to receive and send your mail. POP3 (Post Office Protocol) downloads your mail from your ISP, whilst SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is able to send mail. POP3 works by taking your email address (e.g. nicole.wheatley.ict@hotmail.co.uk) and the password to your account and then taking all the emails which are labeled to be sent to that account and stores it in your inbox.Your SMTP server will be the same as your POP server so it will take any labelled from you, read the recipient of the mail, and then sends it out to that address. 

The traditional method to send mail would be to use computer or laptop with internet access, but now as technology has advanced, there are more ways to connect with people by sending mail. The iPhone has a Mail application meaning their users can send and receive mails to their phone; other smart 3G phones are providing email as well such as HTC and Blackberry.

There are many benefits from using email, such as it's quite a simple to pick up and easy to use service, as well as being free of charge to the user. There is also the huge benefit of being able to send messages to anyone in the world as long as you have exchanged email addresses so contacting distant relatives or business partners is now a lot easier than sending a letter or trying to fax information. You can also send the same information to a range of people and include them in a conversation, so then you can all know the same thing at the same time so no one is kept out of the loop, such as wedding planning and of course at the workplace.

However, with emails come junk mail, an increasingly problematic aspect of email today. A single message is often sent to many recipients as a way of for some companies to gain some business and is often sent a few times to you or repetitively if they continue to use your email address, which means a lot of our email inbox is filled quickly with messages so we may lose track of real messages sent for us that we need to reply to, causing complications and confusion. It is predicted nearly 85% of our mail is spam and by opening some spam mail, your computer can often be infected with virus' which shut down your computer and infect your files. Another negative side to using email is that you must have an internet connection to do so, which some people do not possess. 

I think the development of emailing has been a revolutionary things, changing the lives of many by allowing contact to family and friends, whilst also offering a huge help for businesses. I know my father and mother both rely on email hugely in their home life by contacting my Granddad who lives in America and also with their work, with my mother sending important mails about patients and meetings at her doctor's surgery whilst my father is constantly receiving updates about the mortgages and houses sold at the company he works at. For me, email hasn't yet become a huge part of my life that I rely on, but using an email address has helped in the use of many social networking sites. I don't feel there is any way to improve email apart from dealing with the spam and junk-mail issue as it is harmful to the machine you're working on and is irritating to receive.