Introduction

Electronic mail, sometimes called email, is a computer based method of sending messages from one computer user to another. These messages usually consist of individual pieces of text which you can send to another computer user even if the other user is not logged in (i.e. using the computer) at the time you send your message. The message can then be read at a later time. This procedure is analogous to sending and receiving a letter. Originally, email messages were restricted to simple text, but now many systems can handle more complicated formats, such as graphics and word processed documents. When mail is received on a computer system, it is usually stored in an electronic mailbox for the recipient to read later. Electronic mailboxes are usually special files on a computer which can be accessed using various commands. Each user normally has their individual mailbox. It is straight forward to send electronic mail between users of different computer systems which are connected to major networks. Most major academic and research institutions and companies throughout the world can now be reached by electronic mail. In addition, a growing number of individuals can be contacted in this way. In the UK, most academic and research institutions are linked by a network called JANET (or SuperJANET). This is effectively part of the Internet, so email can be exchanged with most national and international networks.

Email addresses
Electronic mail must be addressed properly, in much the same way as a normal letter needs to be addressed, in order that it can reach its intended recipient. However, with electronic mail the addressing has to be slightly different and must be more precise than a conventional mail address. Most email uses is addressed using internet addresses. These are supported by what is known as the Domain Name Server (DNS). This is an internationally distributed naming scheme and the components of each address are structured in a hierarchical manner. These start with the mailname of the person, followed by various address components, ending with the "Top level" domain (often a country code). In this respect, the addressing is in the same order as that of a conventional letter. For example E.V.Nebor@bham.ac.uk The mailname comes first, indicating who the email is for. The "@" sign separates the mailname from the site. The next components indicate details of the system to which the email is sent. bham = birmingham ac = academic uk = Great Britain The final component ("top level" domain) is normally the ISO3166 standard two letter country code. There are, however, two main types of exception. One is Great Britain (gb) which uses "uk". The other exceptions are mainly some of American domains (eg edu, mil, gov). These are at the same "level" in the naming scheme as countries. Addresses of this form are also known as rfc822 addresses, because that is the name of the Internet standard in which the addresses were originally described. Partially qualified addresses

Some systems will allow the address to be specified in an incomplete form. For example, E.V.Nebor@bham.ac.uk could be expressed as E.V.Nebor@bham This is known as a partially qualified address. The use of these names is NOT RECOMMENDED, as they are not universally recognised and are a cause of many errors and much confusion. The full address should always be used. Other addressing schemes There are other addressing schemes in use, and very occasionally some users will need to be aware of these. These are documented in the Miscellaneous email page.

More Complex Servers

As other people sent mail to mbrain, the server would simply append those messages to the bottom of the file in the order that they arrived. The text file would accumulate a series of five or 10 messages, and eventually I would log in to read them. When I wanted to look at my e-mail, my e-mail client would connect to the server machine. In the simplest possible system, it would: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Ask the server to send a copy of the MBRAIN.TXT file Ask the server to erase and reset the MBRAIN.TXT file Save the MBRAIN.TXT file on my local machine Parse the file into the separate messages (using the word "From:" as the separator) Show me all of the message headers in a list

When I double-clicked on a message header, it would find that message in the text file and show me its body. As you can see, this is a very simple system. Surprisingly, the real e-mail system that you use every day isn't much more complicated than this.

The Real E-mail System

For the vast majority of people right now, the real e-mail system consists of two different servers running on a server machine. One is called the SMTP server, where SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The SMTP server handles outgoing mail. The other is either a POP3 server or an IMAP server, both of which handle incoming mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol. A typical e-mail server looks like this: The SMTP server listens on well-known port number 25, POP3 listens on port 110 and IMAP uses port 143

A Simple E-mail Server

Given that you have an e-mail client on your machine, you are ready to send and receive e-mail. All that you need is an e-mail server for the client to connect to. Let's imagine what the simplest possible e-mail server would look like in order to get a basic understanding of the process. Then we will look at the real thing. If you've read How Web Servers Work, then you know that machines on the Internet can run software applications that act as servers. There are Web servers, FTP servers, telnet servers and e-mail servers running on millions of machines on the Internet right now. These applications run all the time on the server machine and they listen to specific ports, waiting for people or programs to attach to the port. The simplest possible e-mail server would work something like this: 1. It would have a list of e-mail accounts, with one account for each person who can receive e-mail on the server. My account name might be mbrain, John Smith's might be jsmith, and so on. 2. It would have a text file for each account in the list. So, the server would have a text file in its directory named MBRAIN.TXT, another named JSMITH.TXT, and so on. 3. If someone wanted to send me a message, the person would compose a text message ("Marshall, Can we have lunch Monday? John") in an e-mail client, and indicate that the message should go to mbrain. When the person presses the Send button, the e-mail client would connect to the e-mail server and pass to the server the name of the recipient (mbrain), the name of the sender (jsmith) and the body of the message. 4. The server would format those pieces of information and append them to the bottom of the MBRAIN.TXT file. The entry in the file might look like this:

Real email system

Message components
A mail message consists of a header, which contains information about who the message was sent from, the recipient(s) and the route. Many of the header fields are not shown by default, but most programs used to read email will allow full headers to be displayed. This is then followed by the body of the message which contains whatever the sender wishes. lf the mail message is a formal one, it is customary although not obligatory to finish with your name, return address and other useful information as a signature. The header consists of lines beginning with a keyword followed by a colon (:), followed by information on each line. A brief explanation of each field of the header is given below. This header contains most of the common fields. Received: These lines indicate the route that the email has taken and which systems have handled it and the times that it was handled. Date: The date and time at which the message was sent including time zone. From: The sender. The part in angle brackets is a real electronic mail address. This field may be user settable, so may not reflect the true sender. In this case, it shows the original sender of the message. Sender: The sender. This is inserted by some systems if the actual sender is different from the text in the From: field. This makes email more difficult to forge, although this too can be set by the sender. There are other uses for a sender field. In the example above, the sender is set to the list owner by the mailing list

system. This allows error messages to be returned to the list owner rather than the original sender of the message To: Who the mail is sent to. This may be a list or an individual. However it may bear no ralation to the erson that the email is delivered to. Mail systems used a different mechanism for determining the recipient of a message. Cc: Addresses of recipients who will also receive copies. Subject: Subject of the message as specified by the sender. Message-id: A unique system generated id. This can sometimes be useful in fault tracing if multiple copies of a message have been received. Reply-to: Where any reply should be sent to (in preference to any electronic mail address in the From: field if present). This may be inserted by the sender, usually when they want replies to go to a central address rather than the address of the system they are using. It is also inserted automatically by some systems X-Mailer: Any field beginning with X can be inserted by a mail system for any purpose. When using a reply facility it is important to check where the reply is going by looking at the header of the outgoing message displayed on your screen. If the message has been forwarded to you, the reply will often go to the original sender and not the person who sent it to you.