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Our Library: Glossary / BACK
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is the most popular and perhaps the most important service on the Internet. Through e-mail, you may connect with the 20 million or so people accessing the Internet. Networks like Compuserve, which are separate from the Internet, usually provide "gateways" that allow e-mail to pass between them and the Internet.
Every Internet user has an e-mail "address", like she has a postal address for her printed mail. An Internet e-mail address is always in the form: user@system. For example: harry@eis.calstate.edu. The "harry" part is the name of the person's e-mail account; the "eis.calstate.edu" is the name of the computer system where the e-mail is kept.
The most common use of e-mail is to contact and collaborate with others. This contact may occur across the hall or across the world. Students can correspond with other students, with instructors, and/or other experts. Some distance education courses are offered entirely via e-mail, while other courses combine several delivery modes utilizing e-mail for increased interactivity.
For a small amount of money, you can use an existing infrastructure and put e-mail to some very creative educational uses.