What Is Email?

Email, short for “electronic mail,” is a way to send messages over the internet. Messages are sent as digital electrical signals that traverse the globe in seconds. Depending on where a message originates and where it is going, the message may travel over wires, fiber optic cables that cross oceans, and even relay through satellites.

Email is similar in some ways to postal mail, or “snail mail.” However, instead of unique street addresses, every email account has a unique email address. Every email address consists of a username, followed by the @ symbol, followed by the hostname which is followed by the domain. Examples might be [email protected] or [email protected].

Email has several benefits over snail mail including:

• You can send an email to many people at once.
• You can forward a messages to others.
• It is easy to search for messages using words in the subject line or text.
• It is easy to find all messages to or from a particular sender.
• You can include links to web pages, forms, and other online resources in email messages.

You’ll learn how to do all of these and more in this course.

We’ll use Gmail (by Google) to illustrate the principles of using standard email features. Gmail is the most popular email service in the world. Gmail is free, and secure (messages are encrypted for privacy), and it works well on smartphones and tablets as well as computers. Gmail is made by Google and integrates with Google Calendar and other Google products. Gmail is the default email app on Android phones (Google also makes the Android operating system ).