Parts of Email

An email usually has two parts:

• The header includes

  • TO – name and address of the recipient
  • CC – carbon copy sent to another addressee
  • SUBJECT – topic of the message
  • ATTACHMENT – files added to the message

• The body includes

  • The message itself

You can make your message more impressive by using smileys (emoticons) – little pictures made with characters from the keyboard or downloaded images.

Spam – junk email, an unwanted message. In legal terms it means to send 'unsolicited commercial email'

This term is used because the vast majority of spam is sent in order to try and persuade you to buy something.

Many ISP email packages offer 'spam filters' that try to prevent these emails getting through to your inbox, but it is a very difficult problem to separate spam from wanted emails. Your email service may have a 'Bulk' or 'Junk' box that contain the diverted spam. It is then up to you to have a look to see if there are some real emails accidentally caught by the filters.

A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the list".