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If
you are reading this, it is likely that you use e-mail. But do you know
what it really is, besides the fact that Sabeer Bhatia made it hot?
It
takes several days for a letter to travel across the country and maybe a
week to more to travel overseas. To save time and money, millions of
people around the world are using electronic mail or e-mail. It's fast,
easy and much cheaper than post.
What
exactly is e-mail? Simply put, e-mail is a message sent in digital format
from one computer to another.
Using
e-mail you can send your personal or business related messages along with
attachments such as pictures, music over even computer programs.
You
have a business and have offices in several locations, or your family
members are spread across the world. How do you keep in touch without
running up huge telephone bills? E-mail is the answer. It’s hardly
surprising that e-mail has become the most popular service on the
Internet.
A
letter you post is first picked up by the postal van and sent to the
central sorting office. From here all letters are sent to the cities
specified in the addresses. Letters received in each city is then sorted
according to individual areas in the city and then distributed.
Similarly
all the e-mails you send, first travel to the Mail Server of your Internet
Server Provider. From here they are sorted and travel over the Internet to
the Mail Server of the service provider at the destination. Here they are
stored in an electronic mailbox. When your friend logs on to the Internet,
his e-mail application such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora then downloads
the e-mails sent by you from his mailbox to his computer.
The
whole process can take place in seconds, allowing you to communicate
quickly with people at any time of the day.
To
receive e-mail, it is necessary to have an account on a mail server. This
is like having a physical address where you receive letters. The advantage
you have over postal mail is that you can retrieve your messages from any
computer at any location by simply accessing your mailbox using an e-mail
client.
Nowadays
web based e-mail has become very popular. Using web based e-mail you can
access and send messages from anywhere without using an e-mail client such
as Microsoft Outlook.
To
send e-mail, you need a connection to the Internet and access to a mail
server that can forward your mail. The standard protocol used for sending
Internet e-mail is called SMTP, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It
works in conjunction with POP servers, which for Post Office Protocol.
When
you send an e-mail message, your computer forwards it to an SMTP server.
The server looks at the e-mail address (like the address on an envelope),
then forwards on it to the recipient's mail server.
When
the message is received at the destination mail server, it is stored until
the addressee retrieves it. You can send e-mail anywhere in the world to
anyone who has an e-mail address. Almost all Internet service providers
(ISPs) offer an e-mail address with every account.
Initially,
when e-mail technology was introduced, only short messages could be sent.
Attachments such as
formatted documents, photographs etc could not be sent. With the
introduction of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) and other
encoding techniques, it has become possible to send almost any kind of
attachments.
Next: Getting Started
With E-Mail
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