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You can use our WebMail to send and receive email or you can use a traditional email client such as Microsoft® Outlook®, Eudora®, Netscape® Communicator, Pegasus, Thunderbird, or any other program you wish that is POP3 capable.

If you want to use an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Netscape Communicator to send email messages, you will need to configure the client so that it connects to the correct SMTP mail server each time you send mail.

SMTP authentication is a way to ensure that outgoing emails are really being sent from you and not from someone else who has gained access to your SMTP server, such as a spammer. Each time you log in to your email client, you will need to be authenticated before you can send mail. All you need to do is check your email (that is, connect to the POP3 or incoming mail server). Once you do this, you will be authenticated for the entire time you remain signed on.

You can contact our support department to have additional accounts setup at any time. The passwords for additional accounts will be emailed to one of the original two accounts listed on the contract.

Someone sending email incurs no incremental cost; sending one message costs about the same as sending 100 messages. Some folks use this feature of email to send messages to thousands, even millions, of people at once. These are usually advertisements, sometimes sermons on the sender's favorite topic, sometimes pleas for financial assistance or scams intended to defraud the unwitting. Almost all of these messages go to people who did not ask to receive them. Also, some people use email in denial-of-service attacks, using various methods to flood someone's email box with so many messages that their email becomes unusable. These are examples of abuse of the email system.

Also, it is possible to impersonate, threaten, disparage, or otherwise harass someone via email. These are examples of abuse on the email system, and are not the subject of this FAQ.

Notable exceptions to bulk email abuse are legitimate mailing lists, where people subscribe to receive messages pertaining to a particular subject. These lists can be large, and they can account for large numbers of messages being sent, but they are in no way abuse of the email system. Quite the opposite, in fact - they are a perfect example of the productive power of email.

• posting to Usenet or saying in a chat group: "please send me email about foobars"
• sending email to an advertised auto-reply address: "for more information, send email to info@some-isp.com"
• filling out a web form which explicitly mentions email:
  "fill this out to get email about foo"
  "fill this out to get on the mailing list about foo"
  "check this box to get on the foo mailing list"

The following acts DO NOT, by themselves, constitute "soliciting" email:

• just posting a message to a Usenet newsgroup or any other public forum (although individual, topical replies to Usenet posts are have long-standing status as normal Usenet practice)
• chatting in IRC or other chat groups
• simply visiting a web site
• filling out a survey form at a Web site that does not explicitly say it is for mailings
• putting one's email address on any other form, such as product registrations or magazine subscriptions
• posting one's email address on a web page (web page authors should clearly specify the reason an email address appears on the page)
• entering into a business relationship or conducting a business transaction; for example, purchasing a product or service from a company, or downloading a free trial version of a software product from a web site.

1. Run programs that collect email addresses out of Usenet posting headers
2. Cull them from subscriber lists (such as AOL's Member Profile list)
3. Use web-crawling programs that look for mailto: codes in HTML documents
4. Rip them out of online "white pages" directories
5. Buy a list from someone who already has one
6. Take them from you without your knowledge when you visit their web site. For the latest on web browser security issues, see http://www.cert.org/
7. Use finger on a host computer to find online users addresses
8. Collect member names from online "chat rooms"

If you do a lot of web browsing, be careful about filling out forms; some outfits take such action as carte blanche to stuff your mailbox. There are also those who sell addresses collected in this manner. Don't assume that because you are visiting the site of a "reputable company" that this will not happen to you.

An ultra-condensed explanation of email: a sender (person) uses a mail agent (program) to compose a message, which contains the email addresses of several recipients. The agent passes the message to a transport service for delivery to the mailboxes of the recipients, who each use their own agents to read the email.

The rest of this document expands this explanation in two successively finer levels of detail. The Terms section gives a bit more explanation of each role in the ultra-condensed explanation, and the remaining sections explain each step in more detail.

• Terms
• Sending a Message
  • Composing
  • Queuing and Sending
• Transport
  • Addressing Email
  • Mail Servers
• Receiving Messages
• Other Topics
  • Mailing Lists

Terms

To understand electronic mail (email), you need to learn a mental model that involves seven roles, that correspond roughly to similar roles for "regular" letters:

• the sender: a person who composes and sends email messages,
• the mail agent, a program the sender uses to do so; for regular mail, this might be a pen or typewriter
• the message, a computer representation of what the sender wanted to say. For regular mail this would be the paper and its envelope.
• the mail transport subsystem: a system (that is, a complex collection of programs) that delivers the message; for regular mail, this would be the combined Postal Services, airlines, trucking companies, and so on, involved in delivery.
• the recipient, a person who receives the mail
• the recipient's mail agent, which might be a different program from the sender's; for regular mail, this might be a magnifying glass used to read the sender's tiny handwriting
• the email address, a text string used to identify senders and recipients; for regular mail, this would be the text for the usual street address, city, country, and so on.

There are a few more roles that show up in the details:

• a server is a program constantly running on some internet site, waiting for other sites to send it requests to perform some service or other (like delivering mail).
• a protocol is a particular collection of types of requests and responses understood by a particular kind of server. Thus Web servers follow HTTP, the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

Sending a Message

First the sender composes a message with the mail agent, then asks the mail agent to invoke the mail transport system to deliver the message.

Composing

Composing an email message is much like composing any other kind of document; the mail agent usually behaves similarly to many other editors. The main complication is that messages have two parts:

• The header, which more-or-less corresponds to the envelope of postal mail. It consists of a sequence of tagged header lines; tags are defined by an Internet standard, and include things like To, Subject, CC, and Date. Your mail agent will ask you to supply some of these (such as To), will fill in some by itself (e.g. From and Date), and will allow you to add others (like CC).
• The body: the main part of your message, which corresponds more-or-less to the paper you put inside the envelope for postal mail. You can think of this as a simple text message with zero or more attachments; in fact the attachments are encoded as text via a protocol called MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

While in the midst of composing, you may decide to stop and do something else. Some mail agents provide a 'draft' folder into which you can place partly-composed mail, which you can resume later.

Queuing and Sending

At some point you tell your mail agent to send the message you have just composed. The method for doing this varies with the mail agent. Agents with a graphical user interface (GUI), like NetScape Messenger, have a Send button or menu item. Text-based agents, like GNU Emacs RMAIL, have some special keyboard combination, like a pair of control-C characters (ASCII 003, typed twice).

At this point the mail agent may perform certain checks before sending your message -- the primary check being: did you supply sensible values for at least one recipient header field (primarily To and CC)? Once it is convinced it should actually send the message, it invokes the mail transport subsystem to deliver it.

Mail transport usually involves sending information over the Internet. The Internet is not always immediately available when you want to send mail; many personal computers use dialup lines to connect to the Internet, so are sometimes "off-line" while you are composing mail. Thus there may be a second queue somewhere, separate from the "draft" folder, where the mail agent or the mail transport system keeps mail that you've committed to send, but which hasn't actually been sent yet. If the mail agent keeps the queue, it might choose to make it visible through an "unsent messages" folder. If the mail transport system keeps the queue, it might be invisible to you unless your system provides some extra way to get at this information. On my UNIX system at work, for example, the mail transport subsystem keeps the queue, and I have no idea where it is.

Transport

Ideally, it would be nice to ignore what happens in between when you send a message and when the recipient reads it. Unfortunately, you can be faced with the consequences of failures of various kinds at the transport level, and thus need a basic understanding to have any hope of figuring out what is happening.

Addressing Email

To tell the mail transport system where to send your message, you supply one or more addresses for recipients. An address is a text string of the form mailbox@site. The second part is a string identifying a particular site on the Internet; the first part is a string identifying a particular mailbox at that site.

Every Internet site has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, specified as four decimal numbers (each in the range 0-255) separated by dots. The transport service sends the site name string to a Domain Name Server (DNS), which translates the name into an IP address. The transport service then starts up an Internet connection to the given IP address, and asks the destination site to deliver mail to the given mailbox.

For this to work, the destination site has to be running a program called a mail server that is listening for requests to deliver mail. At this point the mail server can do one of several things

• Accept the message and store it in the expected mailbox.
• Forward the message somewhere else, usually to a place specified by the owner of the mailbox, but possibly to a mailing list.
• Reject the message as undeliverable, either because the mailbox doesn't exist, or because the mailbox is full, or because the server is facing some temporary problem.

There is usually no good way to guess at someone's email address, unless they tell you -- although there are some guidelines for finding addresses.

Mail Servers

There are basically two kinds of mail servers, distinguished by the protocol they expect you to use to communicate with them.

• Basic Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) delivery. The server translates the mailbox name into a local file name, and appends the message to the file. For example, on some UNIX system, mailbox XX might be stored in file /var/spool/XX. Mail agents on the server's site know to copy and truncate this file when receiving incoming mail.
• Post Office Protocol (POP) delivery. The server still stores messages somewhere, in a place derived from the mailbox name. However, it allows mail-receiving connections from other Internet sites. The mail agent on the recipient's site knows to open an Internet connection to the POP server, request contents of particular messages, and (optionally) remove messages from the server's mailbox.

POP service is newer than SMTP service; it has the large advantage that you can access your email from anywhere on the Internet, without logging in to the server. You can typically arrange that, when reading messages from some site other than your main one, the mail agent leaves all messages on the server, so you can read them again later from your home site.

Receiving Messages

When you start your mail agent, it usually checks with the mail server to see if any new mail has arrived. Most agents can also perform this check periodically, or on command. An agent downloads incoming mail, and may also (if you so choose) filter out some messages so you never see them.

When the server reports that there is new mail, the agent typically copies all new messages from the server into an "incoming messages" or "in box" folder and removes them from the server. The agent usually keeps track of which messages you've read, and which remain unread. It may give you some way to move messages from your in box to other folders.

Some agents provide ways to filter incoming mail. Based on patterns in the header or text body, the agent can file messages in special folders, or delete them entirely. On UNIX systems, filtering can take place as the server receives messages (via programs such as procmail and mailagent).

Other Topics

Mailing lists and newsgroups are mail-like mechanisms for communicating with (potentially) large groups of other people.

Mailing Lists

For normal email addresses, the recipient's server translates the mailbox into a specific file or directory, into which it places the incoming message. For mailing lists, the server instead finds an associated file containing a list of email addresses, and forwards the message to each address on the list.

(this has been slightly modified from its' original version)