Email

Terminology and History - 'Electronic mail' has been in use since 1975 - Variations of the shorter 'E-mail' have been in use since 1979 - 'Email' is now the common form and recommended by style guides - 'E-mail' is falling out of favor in some style guides - 'Email' was used by CompuServe starting in April 1981 - Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible in the early 1960s - The first ARPANET network mail was sent in 1971, introducing the familiar address syntax - Proprietary electronic mail systems began to emerge in the 1970s - The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was implemented on the ARPANET in 1983 - The current Internet suite of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email protocols became the standard in 1995 Operation - The sender formats the message and uses the submission protocol to send it to the local mail submission agent (MSA) - The MSA determines the destination address and resolves the domain name - The DNS server responds with MX records listing the mail exchange servers for the domain - The message is sent to the recipient's ISP's MTA server - The MDA delivers the message to the recipient's mailbox, which can be accessed using POP3 or IMAP Message Format - An email consists of an envelope and content - The content includes a header and a body - Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) allow for text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments - International email addresses using UTF-8 are standardized but not widely adopted - Fields within emails, such as To, From, CC, BCC, were defined in RFC-680 in 1975 Email Systems - Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet, and local area networks - Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model - Users and their computers are not required to be online simultaneously - ASCII text-only communications evolved to support multimedia content - Webmail services provide an alternative way to access email Miscellaneous - 'Email' is the recommended spelling, replacing 'E-mail' - CompuServe started using 'Email' in April 1981 - The current email protocols (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP) became the standard in 1995 - Email can be accessed using POP3 or IMAP - Webmail services provide an alternative way to access email