Internet and Email

Introduction to the Internet

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a network of interconnected computers using the Transmission Control

Protocol/Internet Protocol (known as TCP/IP for short): it includes the connecting wires and the
equipment used to route the information (the network infrastructure), and the computers themselves.

Even more generally, the Internet is often used to indicate the community of users and computers
collectively. Though a very broad definition, this is perhaps the most useful and interesting — the
Internet is really an information-based society.

Connecting using an ISP

• Internet Service Provider

• Extends the Internet into your computer

An ISP, or Internet Service Provider, is a company that provides you with a point of access to the
Internet. When you connect to your ISP, your computer (or your own network) becomes an extension of
the Internet itself whilst you remain connected. Examples of ISPs in Zambia include Zamtel (Lapgreen),
Zamnet, Coppernet, Microlink, Realtime etc.

How does the connection work from home?

• Modems and routers

• Negotiating a connection

To connect from home you need several things. Apart from a computer (obviously!) you'll need a phone
connection, a modem or ADSL router, and some Internet software. Things will be easier if you're using a
relatively recent operation system, such as Windows Vista/XP or MacOSX, but it's possible to connect
with older or more obscure systems.

With a modem and the appropriate software, you can dial up another modem connected to another
computer, and establish a network connection with it. Usually, this computer is linked into the Internet,
and so you're online.

With an ADSL modem or router, a similar procedure happens, but a filter splits the telephone line into
voice and data (low and high frequencies) and your router negotiates a connection with the ADSL
equipment in the telephone exchange.

Choosing an ISP

• Dialup, broadband or mobile?

• Occasional or extensive use?
• Tied to single line, or available anywhere?

Within the University, the computers are connected permanently to the Internet. If you want to connect
from home, you'll need to connect temporarily to an Internet Service Provider, or ISP, each time you

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need to access Internet resources. Setting this up is a fairly painless process, though you need to choose
your ISP carefully.

What to look for. The first decision to make is the type of connection you want. If you're a very
occasional user, then getting a dialup connection is still often the cheapest and simplest. It's also useful
if you travel around a lot, as it's not (usually) tied to a particular phone line/number.

Most people, however, will want a broadband connection, because it gives a reliable, almost instant
connection (or 'always-on' operation) at a high bandwidth.

You might also consider a wireless connection using data over a mobile phone network. These offer the
ultimate mobile solution, but can be very expensive, often charging per megabyte of download.

Who governs/regulates/controls the Internet?

• A collective free-for-all?
• A collaborative technocracy?
• A commercial communications network?

This is a difficult question! The Internet grew as a collaborative network of researchers keen to share
their discoveries in a simple, accessible way. Because of this, there was no real need to regulate or
control the Internet; the information was already free and was of interest only to other researchers, so
it didn't need protection. But as the Internet has grown, it has become a more commercial, public
entity, and some who use it now wish it to be governed and policed to prevent certain types of abuse.
However, there are various bodies that govern parts of the Internet, which we'll look at in the next few
paragraphs.

The World Wide Web

What is the World Wide Web?

• Web servers, which store the web pages

• Web documents, the pages themselves
• Web clients, browsers of many types

The Web consists of many millions of internet-connected computers, each with information on them
that their owner has decided to share. These documents can be formed of anything from plain text to
multimedia or even 3D objects. These computers, called servers, deliver this information over the
Internet to client computers (such as your PC at home) using a protocol called HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol). The HTTP protocol is very simple; essentially it just provides a mechanism that allows a client
to request a document, and a server to send that document.

As the web has become more and more popular, its capabilities have increased to include such things as
graphics, animations, scripts and even complete computer programs, all embedded into the pages of
the documents. Essentially, the web is the easiest to use of the entire internet toolkit —this is partly
why it has become so popular. Various mechanisms allow the viewer to move around (navigate) the
document easily. Clicking on a hyperlink moves you to another part of the document, or to another
document altogether.

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The Web's unique features

• Universal readership – Uses the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is used to read documents.
• Hyperlinks/hypertext/hypermedia – Combination of links, text and media in the web.
• Availability of information – Computers are interconnected, so information is readily available.
• Flexibility to adapt media formats – HTML and HTTP enable the adaptation of new media forms.

The web has become the most predominant of the new digital media, and has provided the mechanism
for many new forms of publishing. There are many reasons why this is so; a few of them are discussed in
the following sections.

Web Browser

Short for Web browser, a software application used to locate, retrieve and also display content on
the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images, video and other files. Today's browsers are fully-
functional software suites that can interpret and display HTML Web pages, applications, JavaScript and
other content hosted on Web servers. Many browsers offer plug-ins which extend the capabilities of a
browser so it can display multimedia information (including sound and video), or the browser can be
used to perform tasks such as videoconferencing, to design web pages or add anti-phishing filters and
other security features to the browser.

The two most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox. Other major browsers
include Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. While most commonly use to access information on the
web, a browser can also be used to access information hosted on Web servers in private networks.

How does the web work?

• Web servers and web browsers communicate via HTTP

• HTTP ensures that all parts of the web page are delivered
• Web browser decides how these items are displayed

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is actually quite simple. The web browser (or client) makes a
request of a webpage to the server, and the web server passes the page back to the browser. “How
HTTP works: retrieving a web page”. More cleverly, it also passes back any images, sounds or other
media items back to the browser too.

The web browser is also particularly clever in the way it displays what it retrieves. Web pages are
written in HTML, and the browser knows how to display these correctly, whether you have a huge flat
screen or a tiny screen on a handheld device or phone. The HTML language gives the browser hints on
how to display things, and the browser decides the final layout itself.

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How do web addresses work?

The key to accessing all this information is the URI - the Uniform Resource Identifier. Each web page has
a unique address, specified by its URL – Universal Resource Locator, which tells the client/browser how
to access the page.

How do web addresses work?

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results
are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The
information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search
engines also mine data available in databases or open directories

Information on the web is searched using programs called browsers. Examples of search browsers
include Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Bing, Galaxy, MSN Search, Cuil etc.

Emails: The Nature and Use of Email

• Email can be both interactive and asynchronous

• Email tends to be a hybrid of spoken and written language
• Email can be both transient and permanent

How Email Works

• More protocols:
• SMTP - distributes mail between mailservers
• POP - used to download mail to your computer
• IMAP - used to access your mail remotely on a server

Email provides a fast, efficient delivery system for text-based messages. As with all applications on the
Internet, it uses certain protocols to achieve this, “How email works”:

 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is used to distribute mail between servers, and by the mail
client to send the message initially;
 POP (Post Office Protocol) is used by the mail client to download messages and headers to a
local computer from the mail server. POP is useful if you want to read your mail offline (ie not
connected to your mailserver), as it downloads and stores your email on your own computer.
 IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is used by clients to access mail directly on the mail
server. With IMAP, the mail usually stays stored on the recipient's server until it is deleted - the
mail client only views the mail, rather than downloading it.

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Parts of Email Addresses

An email address identifies an email box to which email messages are delivered.

1. User Name
o The first part of an email address is the user name, which identifies you personally on the
mail server that you use. Each user name on a server must be different and consists of
letters, numbers or special characters such as underscores or periods. Your user name might
be your first initial and last name, a business name or anything else you want to use to
identify yourself on the Internet.
2. @ Symbol
o The symbol "@", called the "at" symbol, connects the user name of an email address to the
mail server, or domain. It tells the Internet that your user name can be found at that domain.
3. Domain Name
o The domain name in an email address appears after the @ symbol and identifies the Internet
domain that handles your email. It can be further broken down into two parts: the name of
the computer or server that handles the mail and the top-level domain, often "com," "gov"
or "edu," which stand for commercial business, government agency and educational
institution, respectively, according to St. Edward's University. An example of a domain name
is "ehow.com."

Using Email Attachments

• Basic email is text-only

• Other information needs to be encoded as text
E.g. a MS-Word document is binary data needs to be converted to a text form

Email was designed to be a text-only medium, and various tricks need to be used in order to send any
other type of data. You've probably already come across attachments, which allow you to package a file
or files within the email. The file is encoded so that it won't become corrupted when passing through
the email system.

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Top Tips for Effective Email

• Stick to a single subject: it's easier to organise

• Make your subject describe the contents
• Only send to directly interested people
• Keep your signature concise
• Don't send large attachments unexpectedly
• When replying, make it clear who said what

There are a few things to remember when using email that'll make it easier for you and those you're
communicating with to read and organise mail. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Keep to a single subject will make searching for information in archives much easier.
2. Particularly for work purposes, only discussing the topic in the email title will make it easier to
return to the information later. It's almost as easy to send several short mails as one long one.
3. Use descriptive subjects to make it clear what the email is about. Also, make sure that your
descriptive name is set correctly; it's more useful to see “Jim Smith” on the header that just
“jim”.
4. Only add necessary recipients to the To: or CC: lists, so that only those interested in the email
will receive it. Don't send to a 20-member email list because you want five people on the list to
receive it; you'll have five happy recipients but fifteen unhappy ones.
5. Keep your signature small to reduce bandwidth and avoid taking up too much space in people's
inboxes.
6. Don't send huge attachments, as it puts a considerable load on the mail server, and the mail
may be rejected by your recipient's mail server as too large.
7. Keep quotes in replies informative and neat, making sure that replies to replies are nested and
its clear who said what!

Email Safety and Security

There are a few things you need to remember to stay safe with email:

 Don't trust the sender's name, as it can be “spoofed”.

 Never send passwords or credit card details using plain email.
 Never open unknown attachments. Viruses are most commonly spread through attachments
that install rogue programs when opened.
 Be careful of clicking links in HTML emails, or at least check where the link points to by
examining the HTML. Misdirected links are the most common form of phishing “bait”.
 Make sure your email reader doesn't automatically open HTML mail or images. Often, opening
images on junk mail can send an indication back to the bulk-emailer that your email address is
“active”.
 Choose a sensible password for your email account (i.e. not a common name or dictionary
word, preferably a random string of numbers and letters), and use a secure mail program if
possible.
 Keep your virus checker up to date (you do use one, don't you?), and visit http://
 update.microsoft.com/ regularly and download/install any critical updates.

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