PCTE 1

How Email Works

How E-Mail Works?

Introduction
Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages
across the Internet or other computer networks. Email systems are based on a store-andforward model in which email server computer systems accept, forward, deliver and store
messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the email infrastructure, typically an email server, with a network-enabled device for the duration of message submission or retrieval.
Originally, email was transmitted directly from one user's device to another user's computer,
which required both computers to be online at the same time.
An electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the
message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information,
including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually
additional information is added, such as a subject header field.
Originally a text-only communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media
content attachments, which was standardized in RFC 2045through RFC 2049, collectively
called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).
The

foundation

for

today's

global

Internet

email

services

reaches

back

to

the

early ARPANET and standards for encoding of messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC
561). An e-mail sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today.
Conversion from the ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the
current services.
Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 2
How Email Works

Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File
Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is today carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first
published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email
messages

between

systems,

SMTP

communicates

delivery

parameters

using

messageenvelope separately from the message (header and body) itself.

There are several spelling variations that are occasionally the cause of vehement disagreement.

email is the form required by IETF Request for Comments and working groups and is
also recognized in most dictionaries.

e-mail is a form recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides.

mail was the form used in the original RFC. The service is referred to as mail and a single
piece of electronic mail is called a message.

Origin
Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it.
MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961.[17] It allowed
multiple users to log into the IBM 7094[18] 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 SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

Host-based mail systems

The original email systems allowed communication only between users who logged into the one
host or "mainframe", but this could be hundreds or thousands of users within a company or
university. By 1966 (or earlier, it is possible that the SAGE system had something similar some
time before), such systems allowed email between different companies as long as they ran
compatible operating systems, but not to other dissimilar systems.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 3
How Email Works

Examples include BITNET, IBM PROFS, Digital Equipment Corporation ALL-IN-1 and the
original Unix mail.

LAN-based mail systems

From

the

early

1980s

networked personal

computers on LANs became

increasingly

important. Server based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems developed, and again
initially allowed communication only between users logged into the same server infrastructure,
but these also could generally be linked between different companies as long as they ran the
same email system and (proprietary) protocol.
Examples

include cc:Mail, Lantastic, WordPerfect

Office, Microsoft

Mail, Banyan

VINES and Lotus Notes - with various vendors supplying gateway software to link these
incompatible systems.

Attempts at interoperability

Novell briefly championed the open MHS protocol but abandoned it after purchasing the
non-MHS WordPerfect Office (renamed Groupwise)

uucp was used as an open "glue" between differing mail systems

The Coloured Book protocols on UK academic networks until 1992

X.400 in the early 1990s was mandated for government use under GOSIP but almost
immediately abandoned by all but a few in favour of Internet SMTP

The rise of ARPANET mail

The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There
is one report that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers began shortly after its
creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson is credited by some as having sent the first email, initiating the
use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he
sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10.
The two machines were placed next to each other. The ARPANET significantly increased the
popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.
Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 4
How Email Works

Email Format
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. This is exactly the same as the body of a regular letter.

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

Message header
Each message has exactly one header, which is structured into fields. Each field has a name and
a value. RFC 5322 specifies the precise syntax.
Informally, each line of text in the header that begins with a printable character begins a separate
field. The field name starts in the first character of the line and ends before the separator
character ":". The separator is then followed by the field value (the "body" of the field). The
value is continued onto subsequent lines if those lines 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 encoded words.
Header fields
The message header should include at least the following fields:

From: The e-mail address, and optionally the name of the author(s). In many e-mail
clients not changeable except through changing account settings.

To: The e-mail address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message's recipient(s).
Indicates primary recipients (multiple allowed), for secondary recipients see Cc: and Bcc:
below.

Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are
commonly used in the subject, including "RE:" and "FW:".

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 5
How Email Works

Date: The local time and date when the message was written. Like the From: field, many
email clients fill this in automatically when sending. The recipient's client may then display
the time in the format and time zone local to him/her.

Message-ID: Also an automatically generated field; used to prevent multiple delivery.

Messege Body

Content encoding
E-mail was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII.[26] Much e-mail software is 8-bit clean but must
assume it will communicate 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 do
not support it fully. In some countries, several encoding schemes coexist; as the result, by
default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only
exception is coincidence, when the sender and receiver use the same encoding scheme).
Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.
Plain text and HTML
Most modern graphic e-mail clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for the message
body at the option of the user. HTML e-mail messages often include an automatically-generated
plain text copy as well, for compatibility reasons.
Advantages of HTML include the ability to include in-line links and images, set apart previous
messages

in block

quotes,

wrap

naturally

on

any

display,

use

emphasis

such

as underlinesand italics, and change font styles. Disadvantages include the increased size of the
email, privacy concerns about web bugs, abuse of HTML email as a vector for phishing attacks
and the spread of malicious software.

How Email Works

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 6
How Email Works

Step A: Sender creates and sends an email

The originating sender creates an email in their Mail User Agent (MUA) and clicks 'Send'. The
MUA is the application the originating sender uses to compose and read email, such as Eudora,
Outlook, etc.

Step B: Sender's MDA/MTA routes the email

The sender's MUA transfers the email to a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA). Frequently, the sender's
MTA also handles the responsibilities of an MDA. Several of the most common MTAs do this,
including sendmail and qmail (which Kavi uses).
The MDA/MTA accepts the email, then routes it to local mailboxes or forwards it if it isn't
locally addressed. In our diagram, an MDA forwards the email to an MTA and it enters the first
of a series of "network clouds," labeled as a "Company Network" cloud.
Step C: Network Cloud

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 7
How Email Works

An email can encounter a network cloud within a large company or ISP, or the largest network
cloud in existence: the Internet. The network cloud may encompass a multitude of mail servers,
DNS servers, routers, lions, tigers, bears (wolves!) and other devices and services too numerous
to mention. These are prone to be slow when processing an unusually heavy load, temporarily
unable to receive an email when taken down for maintenance, and sometimes may not have
identified themselves properly to the Internet through the Domain Name System (DNS) so that
other MTAs in the network cloud are unable to deliver mail as addressed. These devices may be
protected by firewalls, spam filters and malware detection software that may bounce or even
delete an email. When an email is deleted by this kind of software, it tends to fail silently, so the
sender is given no information about where or when the delivery failure occurred.
Email service providers and other companies that process a large volume of email often have
their own, private network clouds. These organizations commonly have multiple mail servers,
and route all email through a central gateway server (i.e., mail hub) that redistributes mail to
whichever MTA is available. Email on these secondary MTAs must usually wait for the primary
MTA (i.e., the designated host for that domain) to become available, at which time the secondary
mail server will transfer its messages to the primary MTA.

Step D: Email Queue

The email in the diagram is addressed to someone at another company, so it enters an email
queue with other outgoing email messages. If there is a high volume of mail in the queueeither
because there are many messages or the messages are unusually large, or boththe message will
be delayed in the queue until the MTA processes the messages ahead of it.
Step E: MTA to MTA Transfer
When transferring an email, the sending MTA handles all aspects of mail delivery until the
message has been either accepted or rejected by the receiving MTA.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 8
How Email Works

As the email clears the queue, it enters the Internet network cloud, where it is routed along a
host-to-host chain of servers. Each MTA in the Internet network cloud needs to "stop and ask
directions" from the Domain Name System (DNS) in order to identify the next MTA in the
delivery chain. The exact route depends partly on server availability and mostly on which MTA
can be found to accept email for the domain specified in the address. Most email takes a path that
is dependent on server availability, so a pair of messages originating from the same host and
addressed to the same receiving host could take different paths. These days, it's mostly spammers
that specify any part of the path, deliberately routing their message through a series of relay
servers in an attempt to obscure the true origin of the message.To find the recipient's IP address
and mailbox, the MTA must drill down through the Domain Name System (DNS), which
consists of a set of servers distributed across the Internet. Beginning with the root nameservers at
the top-level domain (.tld), then domain nameservers that handle requests for domains within
that .tld, and eventually to nameservers that know about the local domain.
Step F: Firewalls, Spam and Virus Filters
The transfer process described in the last step is somewhat simplified. An email may be
transferred to more than one MTA within a network cloud and is likely to be passed to at least
one firewall before it reaches it's destination.
An email encountering a firewall may be tested by spam and virus filters before it is allowed to
pass inside the firewall. These filters test to see if the message qualifies as spam or malware. If
the message contains malware, the file is usually quarantined and the sender is notified. If the
message is identified as spam, it will probably be deleted without notifying the sender.
Spam is difficult to detect because it can assume so many different forms, so spam filters test on
a broad set of criteria and tend to misclassify a significant number of messages as spam,
particularly messages from mailing lists. When an email from a list or other automated source
seems to have vanished somewhere in the network cloud, the culprit is usually a spam filter at
the receiver's ISP or company. This explained in greater detail in Virus Scanning and Spam
Blocking.
Delivery
Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 9
How Email Works
In the diagram, the email makes it past the hazards of the spam trapper filter, and is accepted for delivery
by the receiver's MTA. The MTA calls a local MDA to deliver the mail to the correct mailbox, where it
will sit until it is retrieved by the recipient's MUA.

Difference between Snail mail and Email

There are a number of differences between writing and sending an ordinary "snail mail" letter
and an e-mail message. However, a lot of these differences are probably rather obvious, but they
will still be examined.The first difference between these two forms of communication is that
there is less potential for pain to be involved when a person sends an e-mail. It doesn't take as
much in the way of motor skills to type an e-mail message as it does to handwrite a "snail mail"
letter. Of course, in this day and age of computers, people may already be typing letters in word
processing programs instead of writing them out by hand.
The next difference between "snail mail" and e-mail is the speed in which a message can be
delivered. With an e-mail message, you can click on the "send" button, and the message is sent
instantaneously. The recipient of the e-mail message can receive the letter a lot sooner than when
a "snail mail" letter is sent. While the e-mail message can be sent right away, the "snail mail"
letter has to be taken to a mailbox or a post office, and it can take several days for a letter to
reach its intended destination.
Another difference between the two kinds of mail is cost. For an e-mail message, the only cost
that is incurred is a person's monthly bill for their internet connection. With "snail mail" letters,
people have to use a stamp on each letter they write. As of this writing, a stamp costs forty-one
cents. So, assuming a person who has internet access sends five "snail mail" letters in one month,
then that person will be paying $2.05 in addition to their monthly internet bill.

Protocols Used
Internet Message Access Protocol
The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard
protocols for e-mail retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol (POP) Virtually all modern e-mail
clients and mail servers support both protocols as a means of transferring e-mail messages from a server.
Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 10
How Email Works

The Internet Message Access Protocol (commonly known as IMAP, and previously called
Internet Mail Access Protocol, Interactive Mail Access Protocol , and Interim Mail Access
Protocol is an Application Layer Internet protocol that allows an e-mail client to access e-mail on
a remote mail server. The current version, IMAP version 4 revision IMAP supports both on-line
and off-line modes of operation
Post Office Protocol
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by
local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP
(Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail
retrieval. Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support both. The POP protocol has been
developed through several versions, with version 3 (POP3) being the current standard. POP3 is used for
most webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo.
POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes . 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.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail)
transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP is the protocol in widespread use
today. SMTP is specified for outgoing mail transport and uses TCP port 25.
While electronic mail servers and other mail transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail
messages, user-level client mail applications typically only use SMTP for sending messages to a
mail server for relaying. For receiving messages, client applications usually use either the Post
Office Protocol (POP) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) or a proprietary system
(such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino) to access their mail box accounts on a
mail server.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 11
How Email Works

Uses of Email
In society
There are numerous ways in which people have changed the way they communicate in the last
50 years; e-mail is certainly one of them. Traditionally, social interaction in the local community
was the basis for communication face to face. Yet, today face-to-face meetings are no longer
the primary way to communicate as one can use a landline telephone, mobile phones, fax
services, or any number of the computer mediated communications such as e-mail.
Research has shown that people actively use e-mail to maintain core social networks, particularly
when others live at a distance. However, contradictory to previous research, the results suggest
that increases in Internet usage are associated with decreases in other modes of communication,
with proficiency of Internet and e-mail use serving as a mediating factor in this relationship.
With the introduction of chat messengers and video conference, there are more ways to
communicate.
Flaming
Flaming occurs when a person sends a message with angry or antagonistic content. 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. Flaming is generally looked down upon by Internet
communities as it is considered rude and non-productive.
E-mail bankruptcy
Also known as "e-mail fatigue", e-mail bankruptcy is when a user ignores a large number of email messages after falling behind in reading and answering them. The reason for falling behind
is often due to information overload and a general sense there is so much information that it is
not possible to read it all. As a solution, people occasionally send a boilerplate message
explaining that the e-mail inbox is being cleared out. Stanford University law professor
Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 12
How Email Works

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: logistics and synchronization.
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 e-mail ID's with just one e-mail connection.

The problem of logistics: Much of the business world relies upon communications
between people who are not physically in the same building, area or even country;
setting up and attending an in-person meeting, telephone call, or conference call can be
inconvenient, time-consuming, and costly. E-mail provides a way to exchange
information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that is generally far
less expensive than physical meetings or phone calls.

The problem of synchronisation: With real time communication by meetings or phone calls,
participants have to work on the same schedule, and each participant must spend the same amount
of time in the meeting or call. E-mail allows asynchrony: each participant may control their
schedule independently.

Problems

Loss of context: which means that the context is lost forever; there is no way to get the text back.
Information in context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unedited
and sometimes unrelated fragments of information. Communicating in context can only be
achieved when both parties have a full understanding of the context and issue in question.

Information overload: E-mail is a push technologythe sender controls who receives the
information. Convenient availability of mailing lists and use of "copy all" can lead to people
receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 13
How Email Works

Inconsistency: E-mail can duplicate information. This can be a problem when a large team is
working on documents and information while not in constant contact with the other members of
their team.

Attachment size limitation

Email messages may have one or more attachments. Attachments serve the purpose of delivering
binary or text files of unspecified size. In principle there is no technical intrinsic restriction in the
SMTP protocol limiting the size or number of attachments. In practice, however, email service
providers implement various limitations on the permissible size of files or the size of an entire
message.
Furthermore, due to technical reasons, often a small attachment can increase in size when sent,
which can be confusing to senders when trying to assess whether they can or cannot send a file
by e-mail, and this can result in their message being rejected.
As larger and larger file sizes are being created and traded, many users are either forced to
upload and download their files using an FTP server, or more popularly, use online file sharing
facilities or services, usually over web-friendly HTTP, in order to send and receive them.
Information overload
A December 2007 New York Times blog post described information overload as "a $650 Billion
Drag on the Economy",and the New York Times reported in April 2008 that "E-MAIL has
become the bane of some peoples professional lives" due to information overload, yet "none of
the current wave of high-profile Internet start-ups focused on e-mail really eliminates the
problem of e-mail overload because none helps us prepare replies".
Technology investors reflect similar concerns.
The email services are trying to provide maximum email inbox space to save the large size
documents(attachments).

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 14
How Email Works

Spamming and computer viruses

The usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by four phenomena: e-mail bombardment,
spamming, phishing, and e-mail worms.
Spamming is unsolicited commercial (or bulk) e-mail. Because of the very low cost of sending email, 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 voluminous unsolicited e-mail each
day.
E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although
the first e-mail 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 mitigate the impact of spam. In the United States, U.S.
Congress 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,
but its impact has been minimal since most spam comes from regimes that seem reluctant to
regulate the sending of spam.
E-mail spoofing
E-mail spoofing occurs when the header information of an email is altered to make the message
appear to come from a known or trusted source. It is often used as a ruse to collect personal
information.
E-mail bombing
E-mail bombing is the intentional sending of large volumes of messages to a target address. The
overloading of the target email address can render it unusable and can even cause the mail server
to crash.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav

PCTE 15
How Email Works

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 e-mail messages on their mail servers
before they are delivered. The backups of these can remain for up to several months on their
server, despite deletion from the mailbox.

the "Received:"-fields and other information in the e-mail can often identify the sender,
preventing anonymous communication.

Candy,Jyoti Karwal,Vishav