There are many Email programs on the market today, and they all differ in what you will see on the screen. In this section we will go over some of the aspects that all of the packages have in common. We will describe the two Email packages prevalent in our department in the next chapter
Whenever you instruct your Email program to send a mail message, you will be required to fill out the TO: address. This is the Email address of the person you want to send mail to.
Although variaous commercial software products implement the naming of addresses in various ways, we concentrate for now on the Internet standard. The Internet Email addresses typically consist of two parts: the username and the hostname:
The username and the hostname are separated by the @ (at) sign. When sending mail locally (within your office or within your department) it is often enough to just indicate the username part of the address.
Hostnames are divided in several sections. The number of sections (4 in the above) can vary from 2 to about 6. The last part (.edu in the example) indicated in what type of organization or country the host computer is located. Table 1 lists several of these types:
| Type | Within the U.S. Description | Type | Outside
the U.S. Description |
| .edu | educational institutions | .ca | Canada |
| .gov | governement | .jp | Japan |
| .com | commercial businesses | .uk | United Kingdom |
| .mil | military installations | .nl | The Netherlands |
The remainder of the hostname indicates within what organization and often department (ufl=University of Florida, anest=Anesthesiology department) the host computer is located.
Finding Email addresses
There are Email directories that are maintained by bigger institutions, but there is no standard or central management of them yet. This is still evolving.
Currently, the best way to find out somebody's Email address still is to ask the person.
Most Email programs allow you to indicate a subject. This can be very useful for the person that receives the message. If that person receives a many Email messages he/she can scan over the list of messages and decide in what order to read the messages, and if the message is saved for future reference it is easier to remember what the message was about. We encourage you to always indicate the subject.
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