What is email?

What is email used for?

As well as keeping in touch with friends and family, you can use your email account to do lots of useful things like apply for jobs, receive receipts for things you buy online and news from your favourite websites.

Email providers

An email provider is a web-based service that lets you create an account you can use to send, receive and store your emails. Three of the largest email providers are Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft's Outlook. You can go to one of their websites to create an account for free.

Using an email provider means you can access your emails from any device that is connected to the internet.

What it looks like

Like a postal address, no two email addresses are the same. Each email account must be unique.

Salma's friend Maryam uses Yahoo Mail. Let's take a look at the different parts of her email address.

Unique username

The first part is the unique username. This is something you can choose for yourself.

Maryam has chosen to use her first name and her second name but you can use whatever you like, as long as it's not something that's already been used by someone else.

The @ symbol

The next part is the @ (pronounced at) symbol. This makes it clear that this is an email address rather than a website address.

The email provider

The last part of an email address is the name of the email provider, followed by something like .com, .com.au or .org.

This part of your email address is like putting your street name and area on your postal address – it tells people which email provider they are sending the message to.

Well done.

You've completed the What is email? activity.

Now Salma can see how using email would be useful for her, she's decided to set up an account. In the next activity, Setting up an account, we'll see how she does this.