1. How to Use Email
Quick Navigation
Task 1: How to create an email account with Hotmail? ….………………………….….…….. 2
This document is used for Newcastle University Alumni training only.
Task 2: How to send an email? ……………………………..……………………………….…………….. 5
Task 3: How to read an email? …………….………………………………..….………………………….. 6
Task 4: How to reply an email? ……………………………..…………….……………………………….. 7
Tip: What if I forgot my login password? ……..………………………………………………… 8
Appendix I: What else can I do with Hotmail? ……..…………………………….…………. 10
Appendix II: Similar services …………………………….…...………………..…………………..... 10
Q: What is Email?
Electronic mail, commonly called email, e-mail or e.mail, is a method of
exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. An
email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the
message header (including sender’s address, recipient addresses), and the
message body. Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail
and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email
service operated by Microsoft.
Q: Why use Email?
 People receiving it get the message within seconds.
 People can also transfer text, files and pictures from one location to another.
 You can make hundreds of people aware of news or anything else with the
click of the mouse.
 You can check, send and view emails anytime you need to.
 No cost to use
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2. Tasks
Task 1: How to create an email account with Hotmail?
Q: Why need an email account with Hotmail?
A: An email account is a personal network-based address which is usually used to send
and receive electronic letters to/from another person or group of people. Hotmail is the
world's largest web-based email service with nearly 364 million users.
Step 1: Type http://mail.live.com in the address bar of your browser and hit
Enter.
Step 2: You will see the sign up button in the homepage of Windows Live
Hotmail. Please click “Sign up”.
Step 3: The sign up form will be displayed as follows.
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3. Tip:
Your Hotmail address can contain only letters, numbers, periods (.), hyphens (-), and
underscores (_). It can't contain special characters (such as @, #, $, *, etc), accented
letters or spaces.
In the first field, you are able to specify your preferred email address. It can
be any letters, numbers or combination of them as long as it is unique.
Possibly, your preferred address is not available. Hotmail will give you a list
of choices afterwards. You can choose any one of them or try a new address.
Below the field of password, you need to specify an alternate email address.
Do not worry if you do not have. If this is your first time to apply an email
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4. account, please click the link underneath “Or choose a security question for
password reset”.
In the bottom of the page, you need to read and accept the Microsoft service
agreement and privacy statement. Finally, click the button “I accept”.
When you see this screen, it means you have successfully created a Hotmail account.
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5. Task 2: How to Send an Email?
Practice A: Send an email to yourself.
Step 1: In last screen, please click “Go to inbox” and then click “New” to
compose a new email.
Step 2:
a. Write the recipient’s email address in the “To” line.
b. Write the subject of this email communication.
c. Write the email body and then click the link “Send” at the top. In the
email body area, you can write as many words as you want.
Step 3: After clicked “Send”, you may see a message in a yellow bar. This is
because it’s the first time this email account is being used and Hotmail just
makes sure that this account is not intending to send spam email. Normally
you will not see this message. Please click the link to complete the quick
verification.
Please follow the instruction and input the words you see into the box,
and then click “Continue”.
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6. Next, when you see “Thanks for solving the puzzle”, just click “Close”.
Afterwards, you will see that your message has been sent.
Practice B: Send an email to a friend in this room.
Step 1: Ask your friend to get his/her email address. You may need to
memorise or write it down in a paper note.
Step 2: Go to your Hotmail and input the email address in the “To” line.
Step 3: Follow the steps in previous practice and send out the email.
You can ask your friend whether he or she received it.
Task 3: How to read an email?
Step 1: Go to the inbox of your Hotmail.
Step 2: you will see two columns consisting of the email sender and the
subject of this email. You can click either of them to open the email.
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7. The email sender The email subject
Step 3: you will see the email sender, the sent time, email body, email subject,
etc. The email body is where the content of this letter resides.
The email subject
The email sender The sent time
The email body
Task 4: How to reply an email?
Step 1: Open the email and you will see a number of links above. Click
“Reply”.
Step 2: In this page, you will see the email recipient, subject and the email
body area. What you will need to do is to write your reply message in the
replying area, which is marked in a red rectangle as below.
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8. Tip: What if I forgot my login password?
Step 1: Type http://mail.live.com in the address bar of your browser and hit
Enter.
Step 2: In the sign in area, you can find the link “Forgot your password” below
the password box.
Step 3: If you just forget your password and intend to reset it, please choose “I
forgot my password” and then click the link “Reset my password”.
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9. Step 4: please input your full email address and then go to the next field. Key
in the characters showing in the picture.
Step 5: Click “Security Question”. Afterwards, you will be prompted to
answer the security question which was set by you when you were signing up
this Hotmail account.
Note: if you specified an alternate email when you were signing up, the
options to reset your password will be replaced with “Email me a reset link”
and “Customer Support”.
Step 6: If the answer was correct, you will be given an interface to set a new
password.
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10. Once finished, please click “Next” to make sure the new password take
effective.
Appendix I: What else can I do with Hotmail?
You can also do the following things with Hotmail (not limit to)
 Send pictures, electronic documents, video clips as email attachments to your
friends.
 Send emails to a large number of people in one email.
 Use Hotmail contacts to manage your personal contacts.
 Use Hotmail calendar to manage your personal schedule.
Apart from what were mentioned above, you can do many other things to make your
communication become much easier.
Appendix II: Similar services: Gmail
Gmail: is a free, advertising-supported webmail, POP3, and IMAP
service provided by Google. Gmail was launched as an
invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available
to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status
at that time. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7,
2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite. As of November
2010, it had 193.3 million users monthly.
Gmail: http://mail.google.com
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11. The operations of creating account, sending email, etc are quite similar. To start, please
open the homepage of Gmail http://mail.google.com
Please refer to the first task above about Hotmail account creation. And then sign in Gmail
account.
Task 1: How to send an email with Gmail
Step 1: click the button “Compose mail” from the left side.
Step 2: input the email recipient, subject and email body. Once finished, please
click the button “Send” above the “To” line.
Task 2: How to read an email with Gmail
Step 1: in the left side, please click “Inbox” to view the list of current emails.
Step 2: similarly, please click either the sender or the subject to open the email.
Step 3: in the opened email, you will find the email subject, sender, the sent time
and body.
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