How Does Email Work?
Friday, August 31, 2007 - By: Laura Chan
How Does E-Mail Work?
One of the most important things we do with our computers and the Internet is to send E-mail, electronic messages sent from one user’s computer to another user’s computer over the Internet. E-mail, short for electronic mail, originated even prior to the inception of the Internet. In fact, the Internet was largely created so that e-mail could be sent to disparate military installations. To better understand why e-mail is so important, you need to understand how it works, as well as how it can work for you.
To understand how email works, let’s first think of how mail works in the non-digital world. If you write a letter to a friend, you compose the letter, place it in an envelope with the appropriate postage, put it in your mailbox. The letter carrier then collects the outgoing mail from your mailbox and takes yours and other mail to the post office. At the post office, the mail is the sorted into local mail, and mail destined for far-off destinations. The mail destined for other parts of the country travels to the nearest post office hub, then to be routed, possibly through other hubs, to the destination post office. When the letter arrives at its destination, it is then given to a mail carrier, who then delivers it to its final destination. Whew…that’s a lot of steps! Surprisingly, it takes less than a week to deliver a standard first-class letter from point to point, within the continental United States.
E-mail works similarly to the Post Office delivering your mail. You compose your email in your email program, enter your recipient’s email address in the subject line, and then send. Once you click send, your message is then routed through your network, then to your outgoing mail server. Your outgoing mail server, like your post office, sorts your message and sends it through the Internet to your recipient’s incoming mail server. The mail server then delivers the message to the appropriate inbox.
So you understand that e-mail is sent through a virtual postal system of sorts, trading a post office for a post office server, and trucks and highways for the Internet itself. But it still seems more complicated for some reason, doesn’t it? You now need to learn how to create and send email using an email client.
An email client is a computer program or application that allows you to send and receive email. There are two main types of email clients: web mail and POP3/IMAP clients. The first type, web mail, is a way to send and receive e-mail by browsing to a website. POP3/IMAP clients gather information from your POP3 or IMAP server and displays it in a program running on your own computer. Examples of these programs are Outlook and Outlook Express. Often these programs allow you to organize your calendar, address book, and other contact management information in addition to your email.
