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E-mail (short for electronic mail; often also abbreviated as e-mail, email or simply mail) is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronics communication systems. The term "e-mail" (as a noun or verb) applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to X.400 systems, and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Often these workgroup collaboration organizations may use the Internet protocols or X.400 protocols for internal e-mail service. E-mail is often used to deliver bulk unsolicited messages, or "spam", but filter programs exist which can automatically delete some or most of these, depending on the situation.

Spelling Spelling of this term is disputed, and varies by field. While "e-mail" (with a hyphen) is used in journalism (such as by the CNN, BBC and New York Times), the computer industry primarily uses the spelling "email" (no hyphen)."Email" is preferred by Google ,Yahoo and Apple . Microsoft's use of the hyphenated spelling, "e-mail", is an exception to the computer industry's prevailing spelling. In particular, the original spelling is "email" (no hyphen), based on the technical roots of the term, as seen in the RFC documents for SMTP,http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html POPhttp://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1939.html and IMAP,http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html which use "mail" or "email."

"E-mail" is capitalized at the beginning of a sentence and in headings.

Origin E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet.Massachusetts Institute of Technology first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. "CTSS, Compatible Time-Sharing System" (September 4, 2006), University of South Alabama, web: http://www.cis.usouthal.edu/faculty/daigle/project1/ctss.htm USA-CTSS. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 Tom Van Vleck, "The IBM 7094 and CTSS" (September 10, 2004), ''Multicians.org'' (Multics), web: [http://www.multicians.org/thvv/7094.html Multicians-7094. from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were System Development Corporation's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the Semi Automatic Ground Environment system had something similar some time before).

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one reporthttp://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation, in 1969. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971.http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the Killer application of the ARPANET.

Workings Example The diagram above shows a typical sequence of events that takes place when Alice composes a message using her E-mail client (MUA). She types in, or selects from an address book, the e-mail address of her correspondent. She hits the "send" button.

Her MUA formats the message in #Internet e-mail format and uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send the message to the local mail transfer agent (MTA), in this case smtp.a.org, run by Alice's Internet Service Provider (ISP).

The MTA looks at the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol (not from the message header), in this case bob@b.org. An Internet e-mail address is a string of the form localpart@exampledomain.com, which is known as a Fully Qualified Domain Address (FQDA). The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, often the username of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is a domain name. The MTA looks up this domain name in the Domain Name System to find the mail exchange servers accepting messages for that domain.

The DNS server for the b.org domain, ns.b.org, responds with an MX record listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this case mx.b.org, a server run by Bob's ISP.

smtp.a.org sends the message to mx.b.org using SMTP, which delivers it to the mailbox of the user bob.

Bob presses the "get mail" button in his MUA, which picks up the message using the Post Office Protocol (POP3).

This sequence of events applies to the majority of e-mail users. However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to the e-mail system:

Alice or Bob may use a client connected to a corporate e-mail system, such as IBM's Lotus Notes or Microsoft's Microsoft Exchange Server. These systems often have their own internal e-mail format and their clients typically communicate with the e-mail server using a vendor-specific, proprietary protocol. The server sends or receives e-mail via the Internet through the product's Internet mail gateway which also does any necessary reformatting. If Alice and Bob work for the same company, the entire transaction may happen completely within a single corporate e-mail system.
Alice may not have a MUA on her computer but instead may connect to a webmail service.
Alice's computer may run its own MTA, so avoiding the transfer at step 1.
Bob may pick up his e-mail in many ways, for example using the Internet Message Access Protocol, by logging into mx.b.org and reading it directly, or by using a webmail service.
Domains usually have several mail exchange servers so that they can continue to accept mail when the main mail exchange server is not available.
E-mail messages are not secure if e-mail encryption is not used correctly.

It used to be the case that many MTAs would accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable. If an MTA couldn't reach the destination, it could at least deliver it to a relay that was closer to the destination. The relay would have a better chance of delivering the message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by people sending e-mail spam and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and many MTAs will not accept messages from open mail relays because such messages are very likely to be spam.

Note that the people, e-mail addresses and domain names in this explanation are fictional: see Alice and Bob.

Format The format of Internet e-mail messages is defined in RFC 2822 and a series of Request for Comments, RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called MIME (MIME). Although as of July 13 2005 (see ) RFC 2822 is technically a proposed IETF standard and the MIME RFCs are draft IETF standards, these documents are the de facto standards for the format of Internet e-mail. Prior to the introduction of RFC 2822 in 2001 the format described by RFC 822 was the de facto standard for Internet e-mail for nearly two decades; it is still the official IETF standard. The IETF reserved the numbers 2821 and 2822 for the updated versions of RFC 821 (SMTP) and RFC 822, honoring the extreme importance of these two RFCs. RFC 822 was published in 1982 and based on the earlier RFC 733.

Internet e-mail messages consist of two major sections:

Header — Structured into fields such as summary, sender, receiver, and other information about the e-mail
Body — The message itself as unstructured text; sometimes containing a signature block at the end

The header is separated from the body by a blank line.

====Header====The message header consists of fields, usually including at least the following:

From: The e-mail address, and optionally name, of the sender of the message
To: The e-mail address, and optionally name, of the message's recipient
Subject: A brief summary of the contents of the message
Date: The local time and date when the message was written

Each header field has a name and a value. RFC 2822 specifies the precise syntax. Informally, the field name starts in the first character of a line, followed by a ":", followed by the value which is continued on non-null subsequent lines that have a space or tab as their first character. Field names and values are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME MIME#Encoded-Word.

Note that the "To" field in the header is not necessarily related to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The actual delivery list is supplied in the SMTP protocol, not extracted from the header content. The "To" field is similar to the greeting at the top of a conventional letter which is delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. Also note that the "From" field does not have to be the real sender of the e-mail message. It is very easy to fake the "From" field and let a message seem to be from any mail address. It is possible to Digital signature e-mail, which is much harder to fake. Some Internet service providers do not relay e-mail claiming to come from a domain not hosted by them, but very few (if any) check to make sure that the person or even e-mail address named in the "From" field is the one associated with the connection. Some Internet service providers apply e-mail authentication systems to e-mail being sent through their MTA to allow other MTAs to detect forged spam that might apparently appear to be from them.

Other common header fields include (see RFC 4021 or RFC 2076 for more):

Cc: carbon copy
Bcc: Blind Carbon Copy
Received: Tracking information generated by mail servers that have previously handled a message
Content-Type: Information about how the message has to be displayed, usually a MIME type
Reply-To: Address that should be used to reply to the sender.
References: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to, and the message-id of this message, etc.
In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to.
X-Face: Small icon.

Many e-mail clients present "Bcc" (Blind carbon copy, recipients not visible in the "To" field) as a header field. Different protocols are used to deal with the "Bcc" field; at times the entire field is removed, whereas other times the field remains but the addresses therein are removed. Addresses added as "Bcc" are only added to the SMTP delivery list, and do not get included in the message data.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority maintains a list of standard header fields.

Body Content encoding E-mail was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII. Much e-mail software is 8-bit clean but must assume it will be communicating with 7-bit servers and mail readers. The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted printable for mostly 7 bit content with a few characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary binary data. The 8BITMIME extension was introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings but many mail transport agents still don't support it fully. For international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.

Plain Text and HTML Both plain text and HTML are used to convey e-mail. While text is certain to be read by all users without problems, there is a perception that HTML e-mail has a higher aesthetic value. Advantages of HTML include the ability to include inline links and images, set apart previous messages in block quotes, wrap naturally on any display, use emphasis such as underlines and italics, and change font styles. HTML e-mail messages often include an automatically-generated plain text copy as well, for compatibility reasons. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs and that HTML email can be a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malware.

==Servers and client applications==Messages are exchanged between hosts using the SMTP with software programs called mail transport agents. Users can download their messages from servers with standard protocols such as the Post Office Protocol or IMAP protocols, or, as is more likely in a large corporation environment, with a Proprietary software protocol specific to Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers.

Mail can be stored either on the client (computing), on the Server (computing) side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent e-mail clients use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer e-mail between them.

When a message cannot be delivered, the recipient MTA must send a bounce message back to the sender, indicating the problem.

Filename extensions Most, but not all, e-mail clients save individual messages as separate files, or allow users to do so. Different applications save e-mail files with different filename extensions. .emlThis is the default e-mail extension for Mozilla Thunderbird and Windows Mail. It is used by Outlook Express. .emlxUsed by Mail (application). .msgUsed by Microsoft Outlook.

Use In society Flaming Many observers bemoan the rise of flaming in written communications. Flaming occurs when one person sends an angry and/or antagonistic message. Flaming is assumed to be more common today because of the ease and impersonality of e-mail communications: confrontations in person or via telephone require direct interaction, where social norms encourage civility, whereas typing a message to another person is an indirect interaction, so civility may be forgotten.

In business E-mail was widely accepted by the business community as the first broad electronic communication medium and was the first ‘e-revolution’ in Business communication. E-mail is very simple to understand and like postal mail, e-mail solves two basic problems of communication.LAN based email is also an emerging form of usage for business. It not only allows the business user to download mail when offline, it also provides the small business user to have multiple users email ID's with just one email connection.

Pros

The problem of logistics

Much of the business world relies on communication between individuals who are physically distant from one another; organizing and participating in an in-person meeting can be time-consuming and expensive. Email provides a near-instantaneous exchange of information at little cost. Teleconferencing bridges physical distance, but the logistics of gathering people together at the same time remains.

The problem of synchronization

For real time communication, participants generally have to be working on the same schedule. They need to be at the same place at the same time and spend the same amount of time on the same information.

E-mail allows each participant to decide when and how they will process the information.

Cons Most business professionals today spend between 20% and 50% of their working time using e-mail : reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’ fragmented information and of course writing emails. Use of e-mail is increasing, due to trends of globalization—distribution of organizational divisions, outsourcing, among others. E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:

Loss of Context: Information in wiktionary:context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unsorted fragments. Communicating in context is faster and more efficient.
Spam: E-mail is a push email medium: control of who receives information lies primarily with the sender. This can lead to an overflow of unwanted or irrelevant information.
Inconsistency: E-mail can duplicate information. This may be a problem when a team is collaboratively working on documents.

Despite these disadvantages, and despite the availability of other tools, e-mail-based communication is still the most widely used written medium in businesses.

Challenges Spamming and computer viruses The usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by three phenomena: E-mail spam, phishing and e-mail worms.

Spamming is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Because of the very low cost of sending e-mail, spammers can send hundreds of millions of e-mail messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive tens or even hundreds of junk messages each day.

E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the Morris (computer worm) affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system.

The combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of e-mail as a practical tool.

A number of anti-spam techniques (e-mail) mitigate the impact of spam. In the United States, Congress of the United States has also passed a law, the Can Spam Act of 2003, attempting to regulate such e-mail. Australia also has very strict spam laws restricting the sending of spam from an Australian ISP (http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bd/2003-04/04bd045.pdf), but its impact has been minimal since most spam comes from regimes that seem reluctant to regulate the sending of spam.

Privacy concerns E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:

e-mail messages are generally not encrypted;
e-mail messages have to go through intermediate computers before reaching their destination, meaning it is relatively easy for others to intercept and read messages;
many Internet Service Providers (ISP) store copies of your e-mail messages on their mail servers before they are delivered. The backups of these can remain up to several months on their server, even if you delete them in your mailbox;
the Received: headers and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender, preventing anonymous communication.

There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor (anonymity network) can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while Gpg, Pretty Good Privacy or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.

Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as Simple Authentication and Security Layer prevent this.

Finally, attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in Peer-to-peer. Attached files may contain Trojan horse (computing) or Computer virus.

Tracking of sent mail E-mail traditionally provides no mechanism for tracking a sent message. The system(s) involved will generally make an effort to either deliver mail or return a failure notice ("bounce message"), but there is no guarantee that a message will actually be delivered, let alone read by the recipient.This is in contrast to the postal mail system, which offers registered mail or other forms of tracking and tracing.

To remedy this, mechanisms like Delivery Status Notifications (DSN) and return receipts were introduced.

US Government The US Government has been involved in email in several different ways.

Starting in 1977, the US Postal Service (USPS) recognized the electronic mail and electronic transactions posed a significant threat to First Class mail volumes and revenue. Therefore, the USPS initiated an experimental email service known as E-COM. Electronic messages would be transmitted to a post office, printed out, and delivered in hard copy form. In order to take advantage of the service, an individual had to transmit at least 200 messages. The delivery time of the messages was the same as First Class mail and cost 26 cents. The service was said to be subsidized and apparently USPS lost substantial money on the experiment. Both the US Postal Commission and the Federal Communications Commission opposed E-COM. The FCC concluded that E-COM constituted common carriage under its jurisdiction and the USPS would have to file a tarrif.In re Request for declaratory ruling and investigation by Graphnet Systems, Inc., concerning the proposed E-COM service, FCC Docket No. 79-6 (Sept 4, 1979) Three years after initiating the service, USPS canceled E-COM and attempted to sell it off. History of the United States Postal Service, USPS Hardy, Ian R; The Evolution of ARPANET Email; 1996-05-13; History Thesis; University of California at Berkeley James Bovard, The Law Dinosaur: The US Postal Service, CATO Policy Analysis (Feb. 1985) Jay Akkad, The History of Email Cybertelecom :: Email US Postal Service: Postal Activities and Laws Related to Electronic Commerce, GAO-00-188 Implications of Electronic Mail and Message Systems for the U.S. Postal Service , Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, August 1982

Early on in the history of the ARPANet, there were multiple email clients which had various, and at times, incompatible formats. For example, in the system Multics, the "@" sign meant "kill line" and anything after the "@" sign would be ignored. Jay Akkad, The History of Email The Department of Defense DARPA desired to have uniformity and interoperability for email and therefore funded efforts to drive towards unified interoperable standards. This led to David Crocker, John Vittal, Kenneth Pogran, Austin Henderson, RFC 733, Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Message (Nov. 21, 1977), which was apparently not effective. In 1979, a meeting was held at BBN to resolve incompatibility issues. Jon Postel recounted the meeting in Jon Postel, RFC 808, Summary of Computer Mail Services Meeting Held at BBN on 10 January 1979 (March 1, 1982), which includes an appendix listing the varying email systems at the time. This, in turn, lead to the release of David Crocker, RFC 822, Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages (Aug. 13, 1982). Email History, How Email was Invented , Living Internet

The National Science Foundation took over operations of the ARPANet and Internet from the Department of Defense, and initiated NSFNet, a new backbone for the network. A part of the NSFNet AUP was that no commercial traffic would be permitted. Cybertelecom :: Internet History In 1988, Vint Cerf arranged for an interconnection of MCI Mail with NSFNET on an experimental basis. The following year Compuserve email interconnected with NSFNET. Within a few years the commercial traffic restriction was removed from NSFNETs AUP, and NSFNET was privitized.

In the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission grew concerned with fraud transpiring in email, and initiated a series of procedures on SPAM, fraud, and phishing. Cybertelecom :: SPAM Reference In 2004, FTC jurisdiction over SPAM was codified into law in the form of the CAN SPAM Act. Cybertelecom :: Can Spam Act Several other US Federal Agencies have also exercised jurisdiction including the Department of Justice and the Secret Service.

See also Enhancements

E-mail social issues

E-mail spoofing
Netiquette
Information overload
Internet humor
Internet slang
E-mail spam
Anti-spam techniques (e-mail)
Computer virus
E-card
Usenet quoting
E-mail art
Reply All

Clients and servers

E-mail client, Comparison of e-mail clients
E-mail address
E-mail authentication
Internet mail standards
Mail transfer agent
Webmail
E-mail hosting service
Unicode and e-mail
Biff (computing)

Mailing list

Electronic mailing list
Mailing list archive
Anonymous remailer
Disposable e-mail address
E-mail tracking
E-mail encryption

Protocols

SMTP
X400

References Notes Bibliography

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications Version 3.0

External links

The History of Electronic Mail is a personal memoir by the implementer of one of the first e-mail systems
IANA's list of standard header fields

af:E-pos ar:بريد إلكتروني ast:Corréu electrónicu bn:ই-মেইল bs:Emailbr:Anvonerezh elektronekbg:Електронна поща ca:Correu electròniccs:E-mailcy:E-bostda:E-mailde:E-Mailet:E-kiries:Correo electrónico eo:Retpoŝto eu:Posta elektroniko fa:پست الکترونیکیfr:Courrier électroniquefur:Pueste eletronichega:Ríomhphostgl:Correo electrónico ko:전자 우편 hr:Elektronička pošta id:Surat elektronikis:Tölvupósturit:E-mail he:דואר אלקטרוני ku:E-peyamlv:E-pastslt:Elektroninis paštasli:E-mail hu:E-mail mk:Електронско писмо nl:E-mail ne:इमेल ja:電子メール no:E-post nn:E-post nds:Nettbreefpl:Poczta elektronicznapt:E-mail ro:E-mail rm:E-mailqu:E-chaskiru:Электронная почтаsq:E-mailru-sib:Авессяscn:E-mailsimple:E-mailsk:E-mailsl:Elektronska poštasr:Електронска поштаsh:E-mailsu:Surélékfi:Sähköpostisv:E-posttl:Elektronikong lihamta:மின்னஞ்சல்th:อีเมลvi:Thư điện tửtpi:Imel tr:Elektronik posta uk:Електронна пошта wa:Emileyi:בליצבריווzh-yue:電郵zh:电子邮件

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