What is an E-mail Client Program?
In order for you to receive an e-mail, someone needs to send you one! Once sent, the e-mail (just a file), is copied (or sent) to your e-mail provider's computer. Once it arrives, the e-mail server then notifies you that new mail exists.
When you go to retrieve your e-mail, your e-mail client program requests that the server send the e-mail to the client sitting on your computer. (Remember - clients ask for data whilst servers supply it. Usually your PC will be a client).
Once the client program has received the e-mail, you can view it. When you send an e-mail, the process is reversed: your PC copies the file to your e-mail server, which then sends the file onto the recipient's server in readiness for them to receive it.
Note that there are two distinct parts to your e-mail server - incoming and outgoing.
Incoming Mail
Most e-mail servers are POP3 servers and have to have an incoming and outgoing mail server set up. Usually, incoming mail is set up as pop.mailserver.com where mailserver is the name of your e-mail server.
For example, my e-mail server is "dial.pipex.com," so my incoming mail server is pop.dial.pipex.com.
Outgoing Mail
Outgoing mail is set up slightly differently in that a separate server is used. It would be set to something like smtp.mailserver.com, so in my case, it would be smtp.dial.pipex.com.
Great care needs to be taken when setting this up for the first time. You should read your ISP's (internet service provider) instructions on how to do this. Fortunately, most provide wizards to set this up for you.
E-mail formats
There are different ways in which e-mail can be sent, and the format matters a great deal as this determines the kind of items that may be contained within an e-mail. In the early days, e-mail contained plain text. Now, e-mail may contain web items such as graphics, backgrounds and can even contain html links to files such as audio!
Plain Text
The advantage of plain text is that you can be sure that whatever type of system the recipient has, they will be able to read your e-mail. This is true no matter what e-mail client they use or computer - it will appear (almost) the same. I say almost because, even with a text e-mail, e-mail clients can display and print text in different fonts so a message sent in a fixed font that is received on an e-mail client using proportional fonts will appear differently. However, the text will be the same.
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