Using E-mail in Hindi

Introduction

Of all the services the Internet has to offer, e-mail is the most popular. The use of e-mail has been limited to English speakers for a long time. However, now with Indic Computing from Microsoft, it is possible to send and receive e-mail in Indian languages. This tutorial is aimed at explaining the procedure of creating an e-mail account and using it efficiently in Hindi.

Creating an E-mail Account Creating an e-mail account is extremely simple. Microsoft's Hotmail offers free e-mail accounts for users. In order to create a free e-mail account with Microsoft Hotmail, go to www.hotmail.com. Click on the "Sign Up" button. In the page that opens, click on the ‘Get Started Now" link. You will be taken to an online registration form that you will need to fill. In the form, fill out your personal particulars. The username you supply will be your e-mail ID. For example, <username>@hotmail.com. For the name column, if you would like your display name to be in Hindi, you can fill the "First Name" and "Last Name" columns in Hindi, using the BhashaIndia Indic IME for Hindi. Read the Service Agreement carefully and if you agree to the terms, click "I Agree" on the Service Agreement page. You are now ready to use your free Hotmail account.

Writing E-mail in Hindi Sign in to your new Hotmail account using the username and password you supplied at the time of signing up. On the page mail home page, click "New Message" on the toolbar. You will be taken to the page where you will be composing your new mail. In the "To" field, specify the e-mail ID of the person you want to spend the mail to. The CC and BCC fields are meant to specify additional recipients. Those addresses that you specify in the BCC field will not be visible to all the recipients. In order to write mail in Hindi, you will need to turn on the Rich Text Editor feature. In order to turn on the Rich Text Editor feature, click "Tools" on the toolbar and choose "Rich Text Editor". The Rich Text Editor tools will become visible on the editing area. You can now type your e-mail in Hindi using the BhashaIndia Indic IME for Hindi. After you have finished typing your e-mail click "Send" to send the e-mail.

Reading Mail in Hindi Your Hotmail account can receive and display messages in Indic languages. The present version of Hotmail does not support Hindi on the "From" field in the inbox. However, the subject line will be visible in Hindi Click on the subject line to open the e-mail. You will now see your e-mail in the language it was composed in.

Conclusion You can now use your e-mail account to send and receive e-mail in Hindi. You can also configure your e-mail account to deliver mail to your home computer using Windows' in-built e-mail client, Outlook Express. With Indic Computing, you can now use e-mail to communicate with your friends and family irrespective of which language they speak.