Development of an education-oriented e-mail application "Seemit" and its utilization in a information literacy course

We have developed a simple E-mail application named Seemit which is designed for being used in information literacy courses. It has necessary and sufficient functions for an E-mail application, and it has been developed for the purpose of learning basic operations and mechanisms of E-mail transfer easily. It has been developed in HSP scripting language, which can create compact Windows native binaries. The E-mail application is indented to help users to avoid common mistakes in typing E-mail addresses and to understand the mechanisms of E-mail transfer over the net. It is a small set of binaries usable in removable media such as a floppy disk without installation procedures and has been released on the Web as a free software. It is equipped with the function to set automatically the configuration of user's SMTIVPOP3 servers and E-mail address, etc. The process of transferring E-mail via SMTP and POP3 can be demonstrated step by step showing actual messages passed from the client to a server and vice versa. We have utilized Seemit in a information literacy course which holds all the freshmen of our university, about 1800 students. Investigation for students and teachers' impressions of how useful and effective in learning E-mail basic functions and mechanisms show good results.