E-mail is a communication system among people, which is based on the same principle as traditional mail: the sender writes a letter and a recipient receives and reads it (if he/she wants to).   

The only difference is that this happens thanks to a computer that is connected to Internet. The message only takes a few minutes (often only a few seconds) to reach the recipient.   

To communicate via email you need to have an e-mail address, i.e. an "account/mailbox" to send your messages and receive those addressed to you.

All "mailboxes" are hosted on remote computers (called e-mail servers), which can be checked and used 24 hours a day. Their size can vary, which means that they can contain a greater or lower number of messages. Currently most are bigger than 1 Gygabite which means they can contain thousands of emails. 

Having an email address is free: there are different services which allow you to create one free of charge.   

The only fees are those related to the internet connections but are still cheaper than the cost of paper, envelope and stamp. 

All e-mail addresses are structured in the same way: the first part is usually the person’s name and is followed by a "@" and other letters which identify the e-mail service that created the address. 

For example:

geengeeitaly@gmail.com

«“geengeeitaly” is the user’s name. Then the symbol “@” follows and then “gmail.com” which is the name of the service that activated the address.  

N.B: there cannot be spaces between words in e-mail addresses otherwise the address is not valid. 

In addition, there is no difference between capital letters and lower case letters.

The convenience of e-mail, rather than telephones for instance, is that when you send a message the recipient does not need to be connected to the Internet at the exact same moment. The message will be stored in their mailbox until they decide to connect and check their mail.  

It is due to this feature that we are not sure if our message has been read. Recipients don’t always check their e-mails regularly or they may choose not to read your e-mail for specific reasons.   

Therefore, if you have urgent messages it would be better to know if the recipient regularly checks their mailbox. If this is not the case, then it would be better to use more traditional means of communication which are used more frequently by the person you need to contact (telephone, telegram, carrier pigeons....).

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