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Email Types
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks.

Andrew Eugene

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Web-Based Email (Webmail)

This is the type of email that most users are familiar with. Many free email providers host their serves as web-based email. (e.g.: Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL). This allows users to log into the email account by the help of an Internet browser to send and receive their email. Its main disadvantage is the need to be connected to the internet while using it (Gmail offers offline use of its webmail client through the installation of Gears.). There exist also other software tools to integrate parts of the webmail functionality into the OS (e.g. creating messages directly from third party applications via MAPI).

History
In the early days of the web, in 1994 and 1995, several people were working on enabling email to be accessed on a web browser. In Europe, Soren Vejrum and Luca Manunza released their "WWW Mail" and "WebMail" applications, whereas in the United States, Matt Mankins wrote "WebEx". Each of these early applications were Perl scripts that included the full source code available for download. Also in 1994, Bill Fitler, while at Lotus cc:Mail in Mountain View, California, began working on an implementation of web-based email as a CGI program written in C on Windows NT, and demonstrated it publicly at Lotusphere in January 1995. Soren Vejrum's "WWW Mail" was written when he was studying and working at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and was released on February 28, 1995.

Luca Manuza's WebMail was written while he was working at CRS4, in Sardinia, with the first source release on March 30, 1995. In the United States, Matt Mankins, under the supervision of Dr. Burt Rosenberg at the University of Miami released his "Webex" application source code in a post to comp.mail.misc on August 8, 1995, although it had been use as the primary email application at the School of Architecture where Mankins worked for some months prior. Meanwhile, Bill Fitler's webmail implementation was further developed as a commercial product which Lotus announced and released in the fall of 1995 as cc: Mail for the World Wide Web 1.0, thereby providing an alternative means of accessing a cc: Mail message store (the usual means being a cc: Mail desktop application that operated either via dialup or within the confines of a local area network). Early commercialization of webmail was also achieved when "Webex"with no relation to the web conferencing companybegan to be sold by Mankins' company, "DotShop, Inc." at the end of 1995. Within "DotShop", "Webex" changed its name to "EMUmail", which would be sold to companies like UPS, and Rackspace until its sale to Accurev in 2001. EMUmail was one of the first applications to feature a free version that included embedded advertising as well as a licensed version that did not. As Hotmail developed a foothold on the Free-email address market, EMUmail started MollyMail, a service to let you check your existing email from the web. After the Accurev acquisition the EMUmail webmail line was killed in favor of the SMTP.com email delivery service which is still sold today.

POP3 Email Services

POP3 refers to Post Office Protocol 3. It is a leading email account type on the Internet. In a POP3 email account, your email messages are downloaded to your computer and then it is deleted from the mail server. It is difficult to save and view your messages on multiple computers. Also, the messages you send from the computer are not copied to the Sent Items folder on the computers. The messages are deleted from server to make for more incoming messages.POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's). Although most POP clients have an option to leave mail on server after download, e-mail clients using POP generally connect, retrieve all messages, store them on the user's PC as new messages, delete them from the server, and then disconnect. Other protocols, notably IMAP, (Internet Message Access Protocol) provide more complete and complex remote access to typical mailbox operations. Many e-mail clients support POP as well as IMAP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support IMAP

History
POP (POP1) is specified in RFC 918 (1984), POP2 by RFC 937 (1985). The original specification of POP3 is RFC 1081 (1988). Its current specification is RFC 1939, updated with an extension mechanism, RFC 2449 and an authentication mechanism in RFC 1734. POP2 has been assigned well-known port 109. The original POP3 specification supported only an unencrypted USER/PASS login mechanism or Berkeley .rhosts access control. POP3 currently supports several authentication methods to provide varying levels of protection against illegitimate access to a user's e-mail. Most are provided by the POP3 extension mechanisms. POP3 clients support SASL authentication methods via the AUTH extension. MIT Project Athena also produced a Kerberized version.

RFC 1460 introduced APOP into the core protocol. APOP is a challenge/response protocol which uses the MD5 hash function in an attempt to avoid replay attacks and disclosure of the shared secret. Clients implementing APOP include Mozilla Thunderbird, Opera Mail, Eudora, KMail, Novell Evolution, RimArts' Becky!, Windows Live Mail, PowerMail, Apple Mail, and Mutt. An informal proposal had been outlined for a "POP4" specification, complete with a working server implementation. This "POP4" proposal added basic folder management, multipart message support, as well as message flag management, allowing for a light protocol which supports some popular IMAP features which POP3 currently lacks. However, in doing so, it shared with IMAP the embedding in a communication protocol a specific model of a mailbox, which, although common, is not universal. No progress has been observed in this "POP4" proposal since 2003.

IMAP Email Servers

IMAP refers to Internet Message Access Protocol. It is an alternate to the POP3 email. With an Internet Message Protocol (IMAP) account, you have access to mail folders on the mail server and you can use any computer to read your messages wherever you are. It shows the headers of your messages, the sender and it is subject and choose to download only those messages you need to read. Usually mail is saved on the mail server, therefore it is safer and it is backed up on the email server.

History
IMAP was designed by Mark Crispin in 1986 as a remote mailbox protocol, in contrast to the widely used POP, a protocol for retrieving the contents of a mailbox. IMAP was previously known as Internet Mail Access Protocol, Interactive Mail Access Protocol (RFC 1064), and Interim Mail Access Protocol. Original IMAP The original Interim Mail Access Protocol was implemented as a Xerox Lisp machine client and a TOPS-20 server. No copies of the original interim protocol specification or its software exist. Although some of its commands and responses were similar to IMAP2, the interim protocol lacked command/response tagging and thus its syntax was incompatible with all other versions of IMAP. IMAP2 The interim protocol was quickly replaced by the Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP2), defined in RFC 1064 (in 1988) and later updated by RFC 1176 (in 1990). IMAP2 introduced command/response tagging and was the first publicly distributed version. IMAP3 IMAP3 is an extinct and extremely rare variant of IMAP. It was published as RFC 1203 in 1991. It was written specifically as a counter proposal to RFC 1176, which itself proposed modifications to IMAP2.IMAP3 was never accepted by the marketplace. The IESG reclassified RFC1203 "Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 3" as a Historic protocol in 1993. The IMAP Working Group used RFC1176 (IMAP2) rather than RFC1203 (IMAP3) as its starting point. IMAP2bis With the advent of MIME, IMAP2 was extended to support MIME body structures and add mailbox management functionality (create, delete, rename, message upload) that was absent in IMAP2. This experimental revision was called IMAP2bis; its specification was never published in non-draft form. An internet draft of IMAP2bis was published by the IETF IMAP Working Group in October 1993. This draft was based upon the following earlier specifications: unpublished IMAP2bis.TXT document, RFC1176, and RFC1064 (IMAP2). The IMAP2bis.TXT draft documented the state of extensions to IMAP2 as of December 1992. Early versions of Pine were widely distributed with IMAP2bis support (Pine 4.00 and later supports IMAP4rev1). IMAP4 An IMAP Working Group formed in the IETF in the early 1990s took over responsibility for the IMAP2bis design. The IMAP WG decided to rename IMAP2bis to IMAP4 to avoid confusion with a competing IMAP3 proposal from another group that never got off the ground.[citation needed] The expansion of the IMAP acronym also changed to the Internet Message Access Protocol

MAPI Email Servers

Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is a messaging architecture and a Component Object Model based API for Microsoft Windows. MAPI allows client programs to become (e-mail) messaging-enabled, -aware, or -based by calling MAPI subsystem routines that interface with certain messaging servers. While MAPI is designed to be independent of the protocol, it is usually used with MAPI/RPC, the proprietary protocol that Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Microsoft Exchange. Simple MAPI is a subset of 12 functions which enable developers to add basic messaging functionality. Extended MAPI allows complete control over the messaging system on the client computer, creation and management of messages, management of the client mailbox, service providers, and so forth. Simple MAPI ships with Microsoft Windows as part of Outlook Express/Windows Mail while the full Extended MAPI ships with Office Outlook and Exchange.

Service Provider Interface

The full Extended MAPI interface is required for interfacing messaging-based services to client applications such as Outlook. For example, several non-Microsoft e-mail server product vendors created "MAPI service providers" to allow their products to be accessed via Outlook. Notable examples include Axigen Mail Server, Kerio Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HP OpenMail, IBM Lotus Notes, Zarafa, and Bynari.