You will learn to read and send e-mail, to reply to a message you have received, to forward a message to someone else, and to check the 'history' of a message (who else has read it and when).
The details will be specific to the Open University's system, which uses e-mail and conferencing software called 'FirstClass'. However, many of the operations are common to most or all e-mail and conference systems. When you come to use other systems outside of your OU work, it should be easy to apply what you have learnt here.
NOTE:
This has been copied and pasted from the T171 web site.