Net for Newbies

Net for Newbies - Email.

Email, the internet's killer application. extremely useful and simply to use. However if you use your email, then you should check your email regularly and respond to mail you intent to respond to promptly, not to do so is considered bad netiquette. You should never spam.
Whilst email is great for keeping in touch with friends or relatives, you can do more with it for instance you can subscribe to mailing lists, or sent file attachments however if you do send someone a file always ask their permission first.
When replying to and email, remember always quote the email you are replying to quote as for Usenet news, see below:

At 10:27 16/08/99 +0100, you wrote:
>
>whatever part of the mail you are responding to indented to
>show its a quote. Your mail client should indent the whole post.
>but you must trim it.
Your response to the above quote here
>any other stuff you wish to respond to it the mail, trimmed down
> and in order
Your response
Your name or nick and any small signature text.

You quote in this fashion so the person you are replying to can see exactly what you are replying to, remember they may write a lot on email, it's easy to forget exactly what you wrote. You should trim out irrelevant parts of the mail to make it easier to read and save bandwidth.

Signatures

A signature in is a small, section of up to four lines of text and information at the end of your email that personalises it. Generally signatures include, name/nickname URL of your web site, a quote from literature or a favourite song and ASCII art. Please note, a signature should not exceed 4 lines in length a large signature is a waste of bandwidth and bad netiquette.

Mailing lists.

A mailing list is a bit like a newsgroup that arrives by email! There are many of them out there covering most topics you could think of.

Mail without a Dial-up.

If you don't have your own internet account, you can still have Email! Web based Email services allow you to have a mail account you access via their web site, so if you use a cyber-cafe or your local library you can still have email.
Bigfoot - Who also offer mail redirection and filtering.
Hotmail - The big name in web mail, now owned by Microsoft.

Mail Clients.

You may be vary happy with you mail client, but if your not there are plenty of good alternatives out there. See below:

Eudora pro A powerful mail client, a free 'lite' version is also available.
Pegasus Mail It's been around a long time, it's powerful and it's free.