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A Brief E-Mail Primer
Exchanging Mail with Other Systems
Table of Contents
These kinds of scenarios are increasingly common because although there are tens of millions of people exchanging electronic mail on the Net, there are tens of millions more who use other systems such as MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, CompuServe, and America Online.
Are all these systems just countries unto themselves where fraternization is strictly taboo? Well, they used to be, but things have changed. Now most e-mail systems have opened their borders (by installing things called, appropriately enough, gateways) to allow e-mail travelers safe passage. This section shows you how to exchange mail with the citizens of various other e-mail nations.
Every AOL subscriber has a unique screen name that identifies that person to the AOL system. The e-mail address of an AOL subscriber takes the general form screenname@aol.com, where screenname is the user's screen name in lowercase letters and without spaces. For example, if you want to send e-mail from the Internet to an AOL user with a screen name of Will Tell, you'd use the following address: willtell@aol.com Sending mail from AOL to the Internet is the soul of simplicity. When composing a message, just enter the person's Internet e-mail address in the To box. For example, AOL types can send e-mail to me by entering the following address:
paul@mcfedries.com
jsprat@attmail.com Sending messages from AT&T Mail to the Internet is a little more complicated. The general form is internet!domain!user, where domain is the domain name from the Internet address (that is, the part to the right of the @ sign) and user is the user name from the Internet address (the part to the left of the @ sign). For example, to send mail to my Internet address (paul@mcfedries.com), you'd use the following address:
internet!mcfedries.com!paul
The e-mail address of a CompuServe user takes the generic format idnumber@compuserve.com, where idnumber is the subscriber's user id number with the comma replaced by a period. For example, if the person's CompuServe user id is 12345,6789, her e-mail address would look like this: 12345.6789@compuserve.com Missives sent from CompuServe to the Internet use e-mail addresses that take the form INTERNET:user@domain, where user@domain is the person's regular Internet e-mail address. So any CompuServe user who wants to drop me a line would send a note to the following address:
INTERNET:paul@mcfedries.com
To send Internet mail to an MCI Mail user, you can address the message using any of these generic formats: idnumber@mcimail.com idname@mcimail.com full_name@mcimail.comNotice that the space in the user's full name gets replaced by an underscore (_). Also, if you're using the MCI ID number, you remove the dash. So, in the examples I used previously, you could use any of the following addresses: 1234567@mcimail.com mpeeved@mcimail.com Millicent_Peeved@mcimail.comTo send correspondence to an Internet e-mail address, MCI Mail users need to follow a three-step procedure:
Exchanging Mail with ProdigyProdigy is another commercial online service that provides an Internet e-mail gateway. Note, however, that to exchange e-letters with the Net, you have to buy the Mail Manager program.When sending mail to a Prodigy user from the Net, you use an address of the form userid@prodigy.com, where userid is the unique identification Prodigy assigns to its users. For example, if the Prodigy person you want to contact has the user id abcd01a, you'd mail your correspondence to the following address: abcd01a@prodigy.com Sending mail from Prodigy to the Internet is a breeze. When composing the message in Mail Manager, just use the person's Internet e-mail address. For example, Prodigy types can send e-mail to me by entering the following address: paul@mcfedries.com
The artwork displayed throughout this primer is Copyright © Judd Winick. Copyright © 1995-2008 Paul McFedries and Logophilia Limited |
