What is email?
Electronic mail, most commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. Email is now seen as a common method of communication in most work environments. Even for home users, the one service nearly ever Internet user uses is email. Essentially email is simply another form of sending messages between people. Messages may be plain text, contain graphics or file attachments. A message may then be addressed to one or more recipients.
Watch this video to see how to set up a Googlemail account.
Common problems
Very often emails will be delivered seamlessly and almost instantly, however there are occasions when emails will fail to be delivered. Some common reasons for this include:
- Mis-typed addresses – ensure that the email address you have used is correct, contains an ‘@’ symbol and ends with a top-level domain, such as .co.uk .com .net .org etc.
- Mailbox full – some email services impose a limit on the number of and size of messages that can be received, once this limit is reached no further emails can be received.
- Mail server busy – sometimes a mail server can become overloaded (often with spam messages) and messages can then be backlogged. Delays of this type can be a few hours to a few days.
Precautions to take:
- Always remember that an email address should be considered as ‘personal’ information. People can use it as a convenient method to contact you, but it can also be used by spammers and advertisers, or for cyberstalking.
- Avoid giving out sensitive information by email
- You should never write usernames and passwords to personal accounts in emails. It is usual for account details to be sent in separate messages, one for username and one for password, to reduce the risk of both details being intercepted.
- If you can, you should make use of at least two email addresses. One should be given out for competition entries, registering with websites and the like; whilst the other should be kept private for family, friends and official services.
- You should not publicly put your email address on publicly accessible websites for example;- website bulletin boards and message boards. It is common for spam message senders to ‘harvest’ email addresses from public webpages. If you must post an email address, it is recommended that you obscure the true email address, to prevent harvesting, for example:
- bill at uclan dot ac dot uk
Spam
The official term for Spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). Spam is both Unsolicited (recipients do not give their consent to receive it) and sent as a Bulk message, with similar content sent to multiple recipients. Spam therefore are email communications which are sent as mass messages to multiple recipients, largely unknown to the sender, without the recipients consent. The content itself may contain anything from product sales, advertising, sign up services, phishing attempts, cons or hoaxes, threats, to pornography and as it is sent in bulk, may be inappropriate to the recipient. In addition Spam emails may also contain links or attachments which contain, viruses or spyware which may harm your computer or links to other fraudulent sites.
It is advisable that you never reply to email Spam, not only as there is no guarantee that services or products advertised are genuine, but also as this encourages Spammers to continue sending email and shows that your email address is active therefore Spammers (anyone who deliberately sends UBE to others) may target you again.
As well as not putting your email address on publically available websites, you may also want to avoid spam by downloading a spam-filtering programme. These programmes detect certain phrases and subject lines to prevent spam messages coming through into your inbox.
Phishing
Phishing uses email and instant messages which appear to come from official or reputable persons, businesses or institutions such as a bank or building society to deceive the receivers of the message into disclosing personal information such as account details, credit card information and or passwords for financial gain.
There may be some obvious and not so obvious clues that you can look for to check whether or not you have received a genuine email.
- Building societies and Banks in the UK however do not ask for verification of account details, log in details or passwords via email or a web link.
- Always check the policy of any company asking you to disclose sensitive information
- Companies such as e-bay, banks and building societies will all have information on what type of information they will ask you to provide via email or online. If in doubt, ask! You may want to consider for example contacting the company via the telephone or reading your policy agreement to check what their policy is.
- Does the email address you directly by your first and surnames? Phishers sending out random mass emails are unlikely to include full name details, using terms instead such as ‘Dear customer/ valued customer/ existing customer’ etc.
- Check the time of the email, remember emails regarding your account are most likely to be sent during office hours.
- Look for misspelled words, mistaken capitalisation and incorrect logos in communications which are unlikely in professional companies:
- Incorrect logos
- Misspelled words, poor grammar and syntax: ‘Dear valued customer…we peleased to infrom you htat’
- Mistakes in capitalisation: eg. Re: uK BaNk
- What happens when you click on ‘Reply’ to sender? Check the ‘To:’ line, with a phishing message, the address may differ to the one which the email was sent and direct you to a personal email address rather than that of a company.
