What does it actually mean to "have an e-mail account"?

For those who really don't know what e-mail means, we would like to help you.

An email account is exactly like having a real mailman in your computer: you write a letter, you send it to an addressee and the mail is delivered through a series of servers (a server is a computer managing a service) between the place where you are and your mail destination.

Having an e-mail account means having a name and an address where people can send you mails.

There are two main ways of reading e-mail messages: you can browse them on the Internet (Firefox, Netscape, Konqueror, Galeon, Explorer, Opera and so on and so forth) or you can download them and send them through a software on your computer (a software like Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger, Kmail, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express, Eudora or any other "mail client" able to "discuss" with your mail server.

Of course, apart from reading e-mail messages, you can also send them, both using a browser and using a mail client as in the previous paragraph. In order to send your mail, you use a service called SMTP, designed for taking your letters and delivering them to your addressee, wherever she may be.

You should know that normally all these communications are not encrypted along the way, and they can be easily read at any of the nodes of the Internet they travel through.
It's not so unthinkable that if someone wanted to control you, reading your messages as though they were flyers left on the sidewalk wouldn't take her so much time and effort... Therefore, it would be more correct to compare an e-mail message with a postcard rather than with a letter closed in an envelope.

To limit these abuses (and not to exclude any form of control, but to limit it), you can choose to send and download your e-mail via SSL, i.e. encrypted (coded so as not to be easily readable by anyone).