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E-Mail
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Electronic mail (abbreviated "e-mail" or, often, "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic 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 intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Often these workgroup collaboration organizations may use the Internet protocols for internal e-mail service.
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). 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, POP and IMAP, which use "mail" or "email." As with other common nouns, "e-mail" is capitalized at the beginning of a sentence.
E-mail predates the inception of the internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961. It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 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 SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.
E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers. The messages could be transferred between users on different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before).
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one report which indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation, in 1969. Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971. The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.
An "e-mail address" identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. The word e-mail address is also used as the formal pre-registered authoritative electronic mailing delivery site for an individual (example: an attorney's e-mail address registered for delivery of proof of service digital copies of legal pleadings). A modern Internet e-mail address (using SMTP or Usenet) is a string of the form jsmith@example.com. It should be read as "jsmith at example dot com". 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 the domain-part which may be a host name or domain name which can be looked up in the Domain Name System to find the mail transfer agent or Mail eXchangers (MXs) accepting e-mail for that address.
The domain name of an e-mail address is often that of the e-mail service, such as Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail, etc. The domain name can also be the domain name of the company that the recipient represents, or the domain of the recipient's personal site.
Earlier forms of e-mail addresses included the somewhat verbose notation required by X.400, and the UUCP "bang path" notation, in which the address was given in the form of a sequence of computers through which the message should be relayed. This latter was widely used for several years, but was superseded by the generally more convenient SMTP form.
Addresses found in the header fields of e-mail should not be considered authoritative, because SMTP has no generally-required mechanisms for authentication. Forged e-mail addresses are often seen in spam, phishing, and many other internet-based scams; this has led to several initiatives which aim to make such forgeries easier to spot.
To indicate where the message should go, a user normally types the "display name" of the recipient followed by the address specification surrounded by angled brackets, for example: John Smith .
E-mail spam, also known as bulk or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. Now user have several anti-spam software - spam filters (blockers).
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