Study Notes on Basics of E-Mail for UGC NET Exam

E-Mail & Related Terms

1. Meaning of Email: In the history of the digital revolution, electronic mail was developed as a simple method to allow different computer users to share information, much before the advent of the internet itself. It was originally conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In this post, we will familiarise you with some of the email terminologies that we use in our daily life along with some of the questions asked in the UGC NET exam in the previous year's papers.

• Attachment: Any type of file sent along with an email (documents, pictures, zipped folder, mp3s, etc.) is called attachment. An email can have more than one attachment but most email providers limit the size of attachments that can be sent via mail.
• Autoresponder: An autoresponder email is the email received from a computer program. It is usually a prewritten message that is received or sent automatically.
• Blacklist: Blacklist option allows sorting out the problem of spam emails or emails from unwanted senders. Blacklists are sometimes used at the server level before the mail reaches the recipient.
• Bounce: Email messages that don’t reach the intended recipient because either the email address being used are wrong/invalid or the inbox is overloaded.
• Bcc: Blind carbon copy is the copy of an email sent to a recipient whose email id would not appear to the original recipient.
• Cc: Carbon copy is a copy of an email sent to the recipient whose email address would appear to other recipients also.
• Email Address: An email address is an address that a user chooses for sending or receiving emails on a network e.g. abc@gmail.com, xyz@yahoo.com
  
• Email Body: This part of the mail contains text, pictures, attachments and other data.
• Email Header: This is the first part of the mail and suggests the kind of message the main body contains- whether priority-based or other.
• IMAP: Internet Messaging Access Protocol (similar to POP) that describes a protocol for retrieving mail from the email server.
• Mail Merge: Mail merge is the feature that allows sending the same message to a very large number of recipients.
• Post Office Protocol (POP): POP defines an email server and a way to retrieve mail from it. POP (in contrast to IMAP) only allows the user to retrieve the recent messages.
• Spam: These are the unsolicited commercial emails which are usually sent to a large number of recipients.
• Spoofing: Spoofing is an illegal act of sending an email as someone else’s. Often, it appears as an email that came from someone we are very familiar with.
• Subject Line: This is the part of the mail that suggests what email message is about. It is considered very important for marketing purpose and recruitment.
• Virus: Some emails contain messages or attachment that can harm the computer and are called viruses.
• Worm: It is a form of malware. A worm is different than a virus as it operates independently of other files, whereas a virus depends upon the host program to spread itself.

Terminology related to emailing seems simple. However, we need to be careful in examining the thin line of differences that exist between these terms such as spam, virus and spoof, bcc and cc, email header and subject etc. Based on this, let us discuss some of the questions that were asked in previous years.

Question Time

Q.1. An unsolicited e-mail message sent to many recipients at once is a ______

1. Worm
2. Virus
3. Threat
4. Spam

Ans: 4

Solution: The answer is spam as worm, virus and threat are different as explained above. 

Q.2. Given the following email fields, which of the following email addresses will ‘swami’ be able to see when he receives the message?

  To… ram@test.com

cc… raj@test.com, ravi@test.com

bcc… swami@test.com, rama@test.com

1. ram@test.com
2. rama@test.com, raj@test.com, ravi@test.com
3. ram@test.com , rama@test.com
4. ram@test.com, rama@test.com, raj@test.com, ravi@test.com

Ans: 2

Solution: Swami will be able to see the main recipient as well as those marked under cc.

Q.3. ____ is a protocol used by e-mail clients to download e-mail to your computer.

1. TCP
2. FTP
3. SMTP
4. POP

Ans: 4

Solution: Out of the given options, POP allows to download or retrieve messages/emails.

We hope you like the initiative started to cover all the topics pointwise.

Thank You.

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