Script: About Email
Overview
This courselet explains Email in general terms. Focus is on understanding the background for being able to configure any Email client.
Audio Script – About Email
S1 0:0.025: By now we have installed Thunderbird,
S3 0:1.900: but we cannot receive or send email.
S5 0:4.400: Let us take a step back from the hands-on description and examine some basics of human communication systems.
S6 0:10.540: Instead of telling you to put this text into that Thunderbird dialog window, we would like to equip you with a wider perspective.
S7 0:17.270: We want to help you understand mail in general, and we think you are going to enjoy it much more than a „now-click-here-than-click-there“ demonstration.
[Pause 1s]
S8 0:25.760: We want to show you that there is nothing special or even magical about electronic communication. Email is just like postal mail in many ways – with the difference that you never thought about how postal mail actually works for you.
S9 0:37.850: Let‘s look at what it takes to send mail, for example,
S10 0:40.735: a postcard! After writing your postcard you need to find
S11 0:45.050: a mailbox of one of your countries‘ mail carriers and put your postcard into it –
S12 0:49.580: with a valid stamp of course!
[Pause 2s]
S13 0:53.300:
[Pause 1s]
S14 0:54.400: Now let‘s look at what it takes to be able to receive postal mail!
S15 0:59.125: In order to be able to receive mail we need a permanent address. Note that the notion of „address“ itself is a complicated concept already! The organizations delivering mail have to have the ability to figure out the exact physical location based on address information and deliver the mail there.
S16 1:15.500: There are two different kinds of permanent addresses for postal mail.
S17 1:19.330: One is your own address, the place where you live or work.
S18 1:23.840: The other one is a „borrowed“ permanent address. Mail is delivered there instead of to you, usually because
S19 1:30.470: you are not always at home to accept delivery
S20 1:32.850: or because you don‘t have a permanent address.
S21 1:36.130: In addition to having an address you need to make it known to everyone who wants to send you anything.
S22 1:41.600: To sum up how postal mail works, for sending mail you have to find a mailbox that belongs to a mail carrier organization and put your mail into it. To receive mail you have to provide mail carrier organizations with a mailbox – either your own or a borrowed one – at a permanent, fixed location that can be found using the globally agreed-upon addressing system for mail.
S25 2:02.080: There is one thing we can see clearly: Sending and receiving postal mail are two very different processes with different requirements!
[Pause 2s]
S26 2:11.500: Now to electronic mail! Email works almost exactly like postal mail. Of course, instead of people you have electronic components and software doing the distribution and delivery.
S27 2:23.500: We send email just like we send postal mail – by delivering our piece of mail to a device owned by a mail processing organization. Usually that is our Internet providers outgoing mail server.
S28 2:37.000: This is an advanced topic, but just to mention it already: Because this is the Internet where everyone can do almost everything for much less or no money, you yourself can become a mail carrier and do the mail processing and delivery yourself! No need to buy buildings, trucks, and people, software does it all, and you already have the computer.
S29 3:03.300: Receiving email is similar to receiving postal mail, too. You need to have a fixed permanent address in order to be able to receive email. Also just like with postal mail, if you don‘t have a permanent connection to the Internet, i.e. a permanent address, you need to have somebody else to receive mail for you.
S30 3:24.000: Usually that is your Internet providers email server, from which you can retrieve your messages at any time – just like with any rented postal mailboxes!
[Pause 1s]
S31 3:32.600: Armed with this background information you should now have much less difficulty understanding what information your email client asks you for before you can use the software.
S32 3:42.500: It depends on your situation. Like in the postal mail world most people do not operate a mail carrier and rely on others to process and deliver their mail. Although you could theoretically use any of millions of computers on the Internet who are setup for providing this service, you usually use your Internet providers mailserver and send all your outgoing messages to it.
S33 4:02.070: By the way, just like with postal mail that machine does not care which return address you put on your piece of mail – just like you can drop your letter to the family at home into a foreign countries‘ mailboxes with your own home address as return address, you can do the same on the Internet. Any restrictions that exist are not technical but put up deliberately by system administrators, usually to fight the greatest problem of Internet mail: spam, i.e. unsolicited commercial email.
S34 4:30.050: Unlike in the world of postal mail, on the Internet by far most people do not have permanent addresses. So you need someone else to receive email for you.
S35 4:40.600: We can conclude that we are going to need to give our Email software the following pieces of information:
S36 4:46.280: The location, i.e. the address on the Internet, of a computer that accepts our outgoing emails.
S37 4:51.900: The Internet address of the computer that accepts and stores emails for us, and the type of server. We explain the type in detail in the advanced section, for now let‘s just say there are POP and IMAP servers. The latter is more sophisticated and complicated, and you can almost always also access an IMAP server using the POP method.
S38 5:17.500: Just like we need a key to retrieve postal mail from a mailbox we need a key‘s equivalent in the digital world to retrieve our digital mail: a login id and a password.
S39 5:28.500: Because of the massive SPAM problem today many outgoing email servers require a login and a password too.
S40 5:40.400: The last missing pieces are your own Name and Email address. Your email client writes this address into all emails it sends for you, so that everyone who receives emails from you is able to send a reply. Technically, you could send emails without a valid return address but who would want that? Your name is added to the email address so that the recipient knows who you are.
S41 6:08.570: This is everything you need to get started with any email client software!