Working With E-Mail
E-mail has become one of the most important applications for computer users. It is quickly
replacing the Post Office snail mail. With e-mail we can send variety of messages including
video e-mail, pictures, links to Internet information, and more. Most e-mail users tend to save
all e-mail. That can become a problem because e-mail systems have limits. Further, when
Microsoft Outlook e-mail or a computer's hard disk crashes all e-mail can be lost. In this article
we examine in simple terms how e-mail works, Outlook's limits, Gmail, and more to help you
work more effectively with your e-mail.
A simple explanation has e-mail work similar to the postal mail with mail boxes and post offices.
The mail boxes are our computers that hold the e-mail messages after they have been retrieved
from an Internet post office. An Internet post office is a computer called a server that is most
often dedicated to sending, receiving, and routing e-mail messages. The receiving side is often a
POP3 (post office protocol 3) server, and the sending side is a SMTP (simple mail transfer
protocol) server. Both POP3 and SMTP are performed by the same computer. For example, at
one time the mail servers for Comcast e-mail were pop3.comcast.net (I think that it is currently
mail.comcast.net for the POP3 server) and smtp.comcast.net. Verizon has used
incoming.verizon.net and outgoing.verizon.net for e-mail servers. The current post office mail
servers for Comcast and Verizon can be found by searching their web sites or calling customer
support.
E-mail is created on our computer - the mail box. After it is composed it is sent to the e-mail
server post office at your Internet Service Provider (ISP). The e-mail server checks the mail
received to assure it was from you (and not some bulk e-mail distributor), then routes it to the
destination post office server. This takes from seconds to minutes to complete. The e-mail
message is held at the post office server until the recipient signs in to view or retrieve their e-
mail. Generally, the e-mail is checked for attachments that could be viruses (EXE and similar
files), and they are stripped from the e-mail. E-mail attachments have size limits. For some e-
mail servers the limit may be 10 MB and with others is around 16 MB.
E-mail differs from on-line chat applications. Chatting applications transfer messages between
actively connected users. E-mail messages while delivered to the post office, they reside at the
post office until they are picked up by the message recipient. With e-mail there is less of a need
to coordinate sending and receiving times between the parties using e-mail. Flash mobs may
use e-mail to set the general time of flash mob event, and chatting to coordinate activities
while the event is going on. Home and business computers use Microsoft Outlook, Outlook
Express, Windows Live Mail, and other programs like the free Thunderbird to manage the mail
box on the computer. These programs can be configured leave mail at the post office for
several days or until deleted, filter spam messages, maintain a list of contacts and more. The
mail and contacts used by these programs are files stored on the computer's disk drive. The
Microsoft Outlook key files are PST files. At one time contacts were stored in separate address
book files (WAB and PAB files). Outlook Express e-mail files were DBX files. Windows Live Mail
uses EML as the main file extension. To view these files as e-mail messages, you run the
appropriate Windows program, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Windows Live Mail.
The e-mail files are stored in very specific locations in Windows computers. The locations are
different for Windows XP and Windows 7. In Windows XP they are located under the user
account in Documents and Settings. In Windows 7 they are stored in the user account under
Users. The easiest way to find these files is to search for the file extension in the Documents
and Settings or the User folders. When you find them, it is good to make note of the folder in
which they reside because this can be helpful in recovering e-mail messages.
The size of these files is also important. Computers users including myself tend to save all e-
mail messages. It seems easier on a computer to do this as compared to saving all mail we ever
received from the post office because the messages reside in the small computer box and do
not fill our home. However, saving all e-mail is not a good idea. First as the e-mail files increase
in size they tend to make Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Live Mail work slower. This is
particularly noticeable on older XP systems with less than 1 GB or Random Access Memory
(RAM). Swapping data between the disk and RAM is much slower than working with files in
RAM. The old Outlook limit was around 2 GB. After that on older Windows systems Outlook
tends to mess up. On newer system I have seen e-mail files a 4 GB in size or larger. Since these
files grow slowly in size, the performance degradation slowly and unnoticeable increases. Just
as we tend to gain weight as we age. Deleting old messages permits Outlook and other e-mail
software to maintain a level of performance close to what was when originally installed. In my
case I am using a iPhone calorie monitoring App to slowly work my weight down to the level
when I was in my 30's.
The real problems with e-mail happens when out computer disk drive fails. Disk drives do fail
with age. They have a life expectancy of about 100,000 power on hours (POH) or more. This is
like a pet's life span roughly 12 years. The disks life depends upon how well it is kept (cool or
hot), the power it is fed (nice clean power with few if any outages), and how many hours a day
it is powered on. When a disk drive fails, the computer user then realizes how dependent upon
e-mail they have become and the saved e-mail messages (spam and all) take on a value that
exceeds the current price of precious metals. Searching for and then copying the PST, DBX or
EML files to an external drive backs up all the mail box computer e-mail. It then can be
imported into Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail using the file import feature in
each e-mail program so that nothing is lost.
Many computer users have moved to Internet-based e-mail like Yahoo mail, Gmail, and others.
Internet e-mail saves all e-mail messages in the post office server. Internet e-mail services limit
the amount of free storage space you may use for e-mail. In the case of Gmail it is roughly 7 GB.
Other e-mail services provide similar storage capacity. The benefits here are that the e-mail
messages are stored on an Internet server (in the Cloud), you can access your e-mail form any
computer at any time, that smart phones and other mobile devices can be used to access your
e-mail, and you can bring several e-mail accounts into a single e-mail account. So your various
and far- flung e-mails can be consolidated into a single e-mail.
The bad thing with Internet e-mail is that it is often the focus of hacking attacks. Recently, a
customer brought by a system that had their Gmail account hacked. I tried to recover the e-mail
messages to no avail. With Gmail and other free Internet-based e-mail services, support is
almost non-existent. There are no humans to help. If Gmail provided human help, they would
probably wipe out U.S. unemployment. Sometimes the Gmail messages can be found in the
deleted files area. However, in this case they were wiped clean and no e-mail messages could
be recovered. This attack originated from Lagos, Nigeria. It used the address book to send a
false message soliciting money. The money was needed to help the e-mail account owner, who
was according to the false e-mail, stranded in Europe. There is a technique to save e-mail
messages in the event an account is hacked. Two Internet e-mail accounts with separate and
unique passwords are used to back up all e-mails. In the event one account is hacked, the other
account saves the e-mail.
E-mail services are now increasing security by using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure
(HTTPS) connections. This means that Outlook and other e-mail software must use secure
Internet ports to exchange mail with e-mail servers. The Verizon FIOS servers and their
respective ports are: incoming.verizon.net using port 995 and outgoing.verizon.net using port
465. These ports are doorways through the firewalls separating your computer and the Verizon
servers from the Internet. The door ways have numbers going from 0 to 65,535. The secure e-
mail doorway numbers are 995 and 465 for Verizon.
You can tell we are entering the final transition from paper mail to e-mail because the Postal
Service is now forced to reduce its operations while the mail messages between everyone is
increasing. There is now video mail so if you are not a good writer, all you need is a web camera
and off you go. Please remember to not save all your e-mail because it seems like you can.