Electronic Mail

Electronic Mail

PCBWay

Electronic mail has been around since the beginning of the internet. It was the most popular application when the internet was in its infancy, and has become more and more elaborate and powerful over the years. It remains one of the internet’s most important and utilized applications.

JAK Electronics

As with ordinary postal mail, e-mail is an asynchronous communication medium – people send and read messages when it is convenient for them, without having to coordinate with other people’s schedules. In contrast with postal mail, electronic mail is fast, easy to distribute, and inexpensive. Modern e-mail has many powerful features, including messages with attachments, hyperlinks, HTML-formatted text, and embedded photos.

In this section, we examine the application-layer protocols that are the heart of internet e-mail. But before we jump into an in-depth discussion of these protocols, let’s take a high-level view of the internet mail system and its key components.

Figure 2.16 presents a high-level view of the Internet mail system. We see from this diagram that it has three major components: user agents, mail servers and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). We now describe each of these components in the context of a sender, Alice, sending an e-mail message to a recipient, Bob. User agents allow users to read, reply to, forward, save, and compose messages. Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail are examples for user agents for e-mail. When Alice is finished composing her message, her user agent sends the message to her mail server, where the message is placed in the mail server’s outgoing message queue. When Bob wants to read a message, his user agent retrieves the message from his mailbox in this mail server.

Mail servers form the core of the e-mail infrastructure. Each recipient, such as Bob, has a mailbox located in one of the mail servers. Bob’s mailbox manages and maintains the messages that have been sent to him. A Typical message starts its journey in the sender’s user agent, travels to the sender’s mail server, and travels to the recipient’s mail server, where it is deposited in the recipient’s mailbox.

When Bob wants to access the messages in his mailbox, the mail server containing his mailbox authenticates Bob (with usernames and passwords). Alice’s mail server must also deal with failures in Bob’s mail server. If Alice’s server cannot deliver mail to Bob’s server, Alice’s server holds the message in a message queue and attempts to transfer the message later. Reattempts often done every 30 minutes or so; if there is no success after several days, the server removes the message and notifies the sender (Alice) with e-mail message.

SMTP is the principal application-layer protocol for Internet electronic mail. It uses the reliable data transfer service of TCP to transfer mail from the sender’s mail server to the recipient’s mail server. As with most application-layer protocols. SMTP has two sides: a client side, which executes on the sender’s mail server, and a server side, which executes on the recipient’s mail server. When a mail server sends mail to other mail servers, it acts as an SMTP client. When a mail server receives mail from other mail servers, it acts as an SMTP server.