Tuesday, May 08, 2007
How e-mail works ....
Last week I touched upon etiquette. This week I’ll touch on a little about how it works.According to Darwin Magazine, the first e-mail message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Until then messages could only be sent to users on
a single machine. We are still using the same email protocols today.
These were not designed for what we use it for. It was originally designed to carry messages within a closed collection of military institutions and universities. It simply was not designed for the volume that email has reached today. And that really is the problem with it.
Because of this, e-mail is considered a “Best Effort Service”. Meaning there are no
promises. Nobody guarantees the delivery of email. This is true no matter who your
service provider is. But how does it work? There are two basic protocols involved here, POP3 and SMTP.
POP3 stands for “Post Office Protocol”. This is the instruction set that sends email
from your local machine to the e-mail servers. SMTP, “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”
is the protocol email servers use to download your email or transfer messages
between e-mail servers.
Now to read your messages you need an “E-mail Client” on your system. This is
normally a piece of software like Outlook. There are others, Outlook Express,
Netscape Mail, Eudora, Pegasus or Thunderbird are all examples of what we call an e-mail client.
These are not to be confused with web mail services like Yahoo, MSN or G-Mail. Web mail does not pull messages down to your local system. With these the e-mail client is based on their website.
The e-mail client allows you to do several things. It lets you create and send email.
It lets you send attachments like pictures and documents. It displays the number of
messages in the inbox, and it lets you choose an email to read.The large e-mail
suites offer many more features, but those are the four basic functions of an e-mail
client.
Now when you hit the send / receive button several things happen. First, if you are not already connected it will dial up to your provider. Then it send your login info thru port 110 and then sends any mail you may have waiting to go out. When that is completed, the client then uses port 25 to query the SMTP server for incoming messages. They are then downloaded to your system.
When it works it works fine but when it breaks, it breaks. The e-mail system we have
today is taxed to the max and according to studies as much as 3/4’s of all email traffic is spam. If we were able to get a grip on spam email we would be alot better off.
(Read E-mail survival/etiquette...Here)
By Chris Kaminski,
Head Tech for Computer Guys Live
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