E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address.

E-Mail Servers

An E-Mail server is the program that actually sends the email for you. Your ISP has an e-mail server that they give you access to so that you can send email and so that you can receive e-mail from others.

Your ISP's e-mail server will receive email sent to you by others. Many will allow you to read your email from a browser interface which is usually called WebMail. They will also allow you to download the email from the server to your computer.

You download it with an e-mail client such as Microsoft's Outlook Express or Outlook, Mozilla's open-source (free) Thunderbird, or one of many others that may be available to you.

For you to be able to connect your client to the e-mail server, you need the URL of the server, (for instance, mail.mydomain.com) and your Username and Password. There may be other information that is needed for special setups.

Some hosting accounts (those using CPanel) have an automatic setup (just click an option) to install Outlook Express for you.

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