Using MySpace Mail

Mail is your central MySpace communication tool. This email-like interface lives on your MySpace home page and lets you contact a user, receive notifications, and hear from friends and other MySpace users.

Unlike your regular email, MySpace mail is internal to the service. It's used by fellow MySpace users to communicate with one another and is not designed to send and receive messages across the Internet to users of other email services. By default, MySpace does send messages to your regular email account (your login email address), notifying you that you have mail, comments, blog posts, invitations, and so on waiting in your MySpace account. You can turn those notifications off in Account Settings if you want.

Whenever you log into MySpace, new mail messages are flagged in bold red in your My Mail box on the left side of your home page.

To read mail messages, follow these steps:

1.	In the My Mail box on your home page, click the red New Messages! link or the Inbox link (Figure 4.7). Figure 4.7. Click New Messages! to see what mail has come in.
2.	Open the message by clicking the subject link.
3.	Use the buttons at the bottom of the message screen to reply to the message or delete it.

Don't ask us why, but you don't send messages from your MySpace mail or even from your home page. To send a message, follow these steps:

1.	On the profile page of the friend you want to contact, click Send Message in the Contacting box. A blank mail-message window, addressed to that user, opens (Figure 4.8). Figure 4.8. The message window, where you type your email. Remember, it's possible that the person may have hacked, or altered, the page, and you won't see or you might have trouble recognizing the Contacting box. Before you give up on contacting the person, look around carefully; the Contacting box with its eight links (Send Message, Add to Friends, Instant Message, etc.) is probably still there. Even people who love spiffing up their profiles still want to receive messages from friends.
2.	Type your message in the Body text box.
3.	Click Send.

Sent messages are stored in the Sent box for 14 days, and you can check their status (whether the messages were sent, read, or replied to). Currently, this feature is a privacy issue, in that it makes spying easier: You can tell whether a user has read your message, and others can do the same when they view messages they've sent you recently. At this writing, Account Privacy Settings don't address this issue.

Key Parenting Point

Kids are likely to get mail from people they don't know. As with all email, they should be careful about responding or clicking links in those messages that could take them to inappropriate Web sites, and they should be careful about responding to any offers that come via email.