E-mail

E-mail is a way of exchanging messages electronically. There are many different ways of sending and receiving e-mail, and historically, these different ways have not always talked to one another, making it difficult or impossible to send your messages. As a general rule, this is not true any more, but exceptions abound.

Webster, with access to the Internet, has a gateway to the rest of the world that also has a gateway to the Internet. In order to send mail, you need a personal e-mail address which gives you your identity in electronic mail (think of this as the return address). At Webster, e-mail addresses are offered through Primary Network, as part of the dial-in accounts that can be purchased, but are not generally available for free.

With an e-mail account, you can receive messages and read them at your leisure (like voice mail). You can also subscribe to mailing lists that are organized by topic (like newsgroups), but which are distributed more discreetly. These are called Listservs, because computer servers administer the e-mailing list automagically.

E-mail, misused, is a frequent source of irate commentary on the Internet, as it is not difficult to send a message to a *LOT* of people. This happens not infrequently and is a cause for genuine frustration and expense, so, if you use e-mail, please be careful. It is possible, if you (inadvertently) irritate enough people with missent e-mail, for them to crash our computers with their thousands of angry responses all hitting us at once (this happens to the US Senate all the time...), and the University would not look favorably upon the individual who caused such a system crash , however innocently they made the error. Please make sure you send only To: the person(s) you intend--it's that simple.

Click here for more information on checking your e-mail from University Center.

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