Page 105 - digitalliteracy

5.2 Writing Academic and

Professional E-mails

E-mail, which means electronic mail, is an easy and convenient way to communicate and a
perfectly appropriate way to communicate in your online classroom or business environ-
ment. Although it is informal in its style, e-mail messages should still be treated as perma-
nent, written documents.

Using an E-mail Account

An e-mail address looks like this: name@example.com. You would say it like this: “name at
example dot com.” The section before the @ symbol is the user name, and the section after the
@ symbol is called the domain.

There are two most common ways of sending and receiving e-mail: You can send e-mail using
an e-mail program on your computer, such as Microsoft Outlook, or by using web mail. Micro-
soft Outlook is a program installed on one computer, and all e-mail is stored on that computer.
With web mail, your e-mails are stored on the web mail program itself, such as Yahoo! or
Gmail. You can access your e-mails on the web through free services. An advantage of web
mail is that you can access all your messages from any computer that has an Internet connec-
tion. There is no one right choice regarding which type of e-mail system to use; in fact, some
people use both types.

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