E-mail Features

Now a day, the mail client comes with enhanced features such as attachment, address book, and MIME support. Here in this chapter we will discuss all of these features which will give you a better understanding of added feature of a mail client program.

Attachment

Ability to attach file(s) along with the message is one of the most useful features of email. The attachment may be a word document, PowerPoint presentation, audio/video files, or images.

• In order to attach file(s) to an email, click the attach button. As a result, a dialog box appears asking for specifying the name and location of the file you want to attach.

• Once you have selected the appropriate file, it is attached to the mail.

• Usually a paper clip icon appears in the email which indicates that it has an attachment.

• When adding an attachment it is better to compress the attached files so as to reduce the file size and save transmission time as sending and downloading large files consumes a lot of space and time.

Address Book

Address book feature of a mail program allows the users to store information about the people whom they communicate regularly by sending emails. Here are some of the key features of an Address book:

• Address book includes the nick names, email addresses, phone number etc. of the people.

• Using address book allows us not to memorize email of address of a person, you just have to select recipient name from the list.

• When you select a particular name from the list, the corresponding email address link automatically get inserted in to the To: field.

• Address book also allows creating a group so that you can send a email to very member of the group at once instead of giving each person email address one by one.

MIME Types

MIME is acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME compliant mailer allows us to send files other than simple text i.e. It allows us to send audio, video, images, document, and pdf files as an attachment to an email.

Suppose if you want to send a word processor document that has a group of tabular columns with complex formatting. If we transfer the file as text, all the formatting may be lost. MIME compliant mailer takes care of messy details and the message arrives as desired.

The following table describes commonly used MIME Types: