Tech Talk: E-mail Quiz

An engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message in 1971. The message had nothing to do with Nigerian banks or home equity loans.

E-mail clients are applications that let you send, receive and view e-mails. Some are desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook. Others, like Gmail, are Web-based services.

Ports are data connections designated by a specific number. In order to access a specific process on a server, you have to contact the correct port on that server.

A Simple Mail Transfer Protocol server handles outgoing e-mail messages.

A POP3 or an IMAP server handles all incoming e-mail messages.

An SMTP server monitors port 25 for outgoing e-mail messages.

Because e-mail messages can only include text information, attachments must be converted into text. Before automation, e-mail users had to do this by hand with the uuencode program.

A 2007 study said that 91 percent of all U.S. Internet users had logged onto the Internet to send or read e-mail.

The Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) allows you to read your e-mail even though the messages themselves remain on the mail server.

Using LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS IS A BAD IDEA. That's because it seems like you're shouting at the message's recipient, and very few people enjoy being yelled at.