Technical Side Of Business E-Mail
How does a computer encode my e-mails?
Your computer encodes your email by transmitting it into binary numbers, so for example if you type the word 'love', l-o-v-e, onto your keyboard, that gets transmitted and converted into binary numbers. Binary numbers are 0s and 1s. That word 'love' becomes 0s and 1s which then leaves your computer and is transmitted electronically from your computer to another person's IP address, their address on the internet, their internet protocol address. It then shows up into their computer and that computer converts those binary numbers back in to the word 'love' and that's how words in communication are transmitted via e-mail. It's not actually the word, it's the binary numbers that get converted and transmitted when you emails are encoded.
Does it matter if use upper or lowercase in an e-mail address?
It doesn't matter if you use upper or lowercase in an e-mail address. The history goes back into the early 80s where people thought at one point, and it was registered, that large caps and specific capitalizations of letters mattered to an e-mail address. But today, because of the sophistication and the volume of e-mail, it's just registered directly as letters, so you don't need to capitalize letters when typing in your email address.
What software do businesses use for e-mail?
The software that businesses will use for e-mail can be Outlook or Lotus Notes or Entourage or GroupWise. Those are the four predominant ones that are used out in the market, as opposed to Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL that some of us have as our personal e-mail accounts. Largely, companies that are using those more sophisticated e-mail services are using it as a part of a package. Microsoft produces a package with Excel, Power Point, Word and so forth, and Outlook is part of that package. It's an easy way to communicate and it also has sophistication in terms of tracking all those e-mails and the storage of it. Indeed that kind of software for businesses' emails will have a lot of the functionality that some of the other services don't necessarily have, so that's why corporations use the larger packages.
How does business e-mail get from one computer to another?
The way business email gets from one computer to another is once you type the message and it leaves your computer, it is transmitted electronically from your computer through a modem out onto the Internet, and through the Internet, whether its wireless or perhaps wired within a corporation. Indeed most corporations are not as wireless as maybe a home environment so in a corporation it will largely go through a T-1 line which is a very high speed Internet cable line. The email would then be transmitted through a server and perhaps through a firewall and back through another server, through a modem and into someone's computer. So basically you email will follow the path of modem - Internet - modem and back onto somebody's computer. But there is a lot of variations on how an email gets from one computer to another because of a lot of security issues now with servers, routers, and modems.
Why do different sites use different TLDs?
Different sites use different TLDs and this is for a number of reasons. '.com' is usually used for businesses, '.net' mostly in commercial applications whereas the '.org' may be more of associations, such as breast cancer and cancer awareness organisations, stuff like that. Philanthropic endeavours usually have a '.org'. '.gov' can be seen if you go on to a website address and it says US Department of Justice.gov, showing you that it's the government's third level domain for their IP address, the last part of it being .government.
