Using English at Work

Lesson 2 - Checking Mail, Email, and Voicemail

most important ideas. Companies often use memos to provide information quickly to their employees.

Many of the letters and memos I receive are what I call "junk mail." "Junk mail" is mail or email that doesn't have any useful or helpful information in it; it's the mail that you throw away or delete from your email program without reading. It's mail that you didn't ask for and that you don't want. Another word for "junk mail" when we're talking about email is "spam." At my house, most of the junk mail I get are advertisements that I don't want, so I throw them away without even reading them. At the office, I spend a few minutes sorting through the junk mail. "To sort" means to put things in order, or to divide things into different groups or categories. In this case, I'm separating the junk mail from the mail I really want to read. You might, for example, sort your clothes by color, or you might sort your papers in alphabetical order from A to Z.

After sorting through my junk mail, I turn on my computer to check email. I open my email program and my new messages automatically download into my inbox. "To download" means to copy a file from the Internet or a large network computer onto your own computer. Many people like to download music or videos from the Internet. My email gets downloaded from the company's large computer servers into my inbox, the electronic space for new messages that I need to read. I have a pretty good spam filter. A "spam filter" is usually part of your email program that keeps, or prevents, spam - unwanted emails - from coming into your email inbox. We say the spam filter "traps" a lot of emails for advertisements and other things I never asked for. "To trap," here, means to get, to hold, and not to let go so that you don't see them when you open your inbox. Sometimes a spam filter is too high and it puts emails that want to see into the trash or spam folder by accident or by mistake. We talk about a spam filter being "high," that means it's trapping too many messages. That's why I still check through my trash folder carefully to make sure nothing important was trapped or filtered out. "Trash" is another word for garbage, or something that you throw away, that you don't want. So your "trash folder" is where the email program may put trash - things you don't want. Many email programs have a separate "spam folder," where all the spam messages go. When I check through my trash folder, I look at all the messages in the folder, just to make sure they're really trash or things I don't want anymore, so I can read any messages that were put there by accident.

We're not supposed to, at my office, get personal emails at work, but sometimes my friends send or forward me messages to my work address. "To forward (something)" in this case means to send an email that you have received to other people. Sometimes my friends and relatives forward funny jokes - although usually they're not very funny! They didn't write the jokes, but they receive them