ROFEL BBA & BCA College, VAPI

Unit-5
Mail Services
503 NETWORK TECHNOLOGIES

Asst. Prof. Zinkal Patel

ROFEL BBA & BCA COLLEGE VAPI
Unit-5 Mail Services

5.1 Application Layer services:

5.1.1 Concepts of email
5.1.2 Working of email account and services
5.1.3 URL and URL types (Absolute, Relative)
5.2 Case study of email:
5.2.1 From sender to receiver (Mailer, Mail Server, Mailbox)
5.2.2 Functionality and use of protocols at different layers
5.3 Case study of locating Website:
5.3.1 URL and locating URL
5.3.2 Steps and protocols involved in accessing URL
5.3.3 Concepts of search engine and purpose

Application Layer Services

Concept of email
 Email is a service which allows us to send the message in electronic mode over the
internet. It offers an efficient, inexpensive and real time mean of distributing
information among people.
 E-mail is defined as the transmission of messages on the Internet. It is one of the most
commonly used features over communications networks that may contain text, files,
images, or other attachments. Generally, it is information that is stored on a
computer sent through a network to a specified individual or group of individuals.
 Email messages include three components, which are as follows:

o Message envelope: It depicts the email's electronic format.

o Message header: It contains email subject line and sender/recipient information.

o Message body: It comprises images, text, and other file attachments.

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E-Mail Address
 Each user of email is assigned a unique name for his email account. This name is
known as E-mail address. Different users can send and receive messages according to
the e-mail address.
 E-mail is generally of the form username@domainname. For example,
abcd@gmail.com is an e-mail address where abcd is username and gmail.com is
domain name.
o The username and the domain name are separated by @ (at) symbol.
o E-mail addresses are not case sensitive.
o Spaces are not allowed in e-mail address.

E-mail Message Components

 E-mail message comprises of different components: E-mail Header, Greeting, Text,
and Signature. These components are described in the following diagram:

E-mail Header
 The first five lines of an E-mail message is called E-mail header. The header part
comprises of following fields:
 From
 Date

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 To
 Subject
 CC
 BCC

From
 The From field indicates the sender’s address i.e. who sent the e-mail.
Date
 The Date field indicates the date when the e-mail was sent.
To
 The To field indicates the recipient’s address i.e. to whom the e-mail is sent.
Subject
 The Subject field indicates the purpose of e-mail. It should be precise and to the
point.
CC
 CC stands for Carbon copy. It includes those recipient addresses whom we want to
keep informed but not exactly the intended recipient.
BCC
 BCC stands for Black Carbon Copy. It is used when we do not want one or more of the
recipients to know that someone else was copied on the message.
Greeting
 Greeting is the opening of the actual message. Eg. Hi Sir or Hi Guys etc.
Text
 It represents the actual content of the message.
Signature
 This is the final part of an e-mail message. It includes Name of Sender, Address, and
Contact Number.

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Advantages:
1. Reliable
 Many of the mail systems notify the sender if e-mail message was undeliverable.
2. Convenience

 There is no requirement of stationary and stamps. One does not have to go to post
office. But all these things are not required for sending or receiving an e mail.
3. Speed

 E-mail is very fast. However, the speed also depends upon the underlying network.
4. Inexpensive

 The cost of sending e-mail is very low.

5. Printable

 It is easy to obtain a hardcopy of an e-mail. Also an electronic copy of an e-mail

can also be saved for records.
6. Global

 E-mail can be sent and received by a person sitting across the globe.
7. Generality

 It is also possible to send graphics, programs and sounds with an e-mail.

Disadvantages:
1. Forgery

 E-mail doesn’t prevent from forgery, that is, someone impersonating the sender,
since sender is usually not authenticated in any way.

2. Overload

 Convenience of E-mail may result in a flood of mail.

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3. Misdirection

 It is possible that you may send e-mail to an unintended recipient.

4. Junk

 Junk emails are undesirable and inappropriate emails. Junk emails are sometimes
referred to as spam.

5. No Response

 It may be frustrating when the recipient does not read the e-mail and respond on a
regular basis.

Working of email account and services

 E-mail system comprises of the following three components:
 Mailer
 Mail Server
 Mailbox
1. Mailer
 It is also called mail program, mail application or mail client. It allows us to manage,
read and compose e-mail.
2. Mail Server
 The function of mail server is to receive, store and deliver the email. It is must for mail
servers to be running all the time because if it crashes or is down, email can be lost.
3. Mailboxes
 Mailbox is generally a folder that contains emails and information about them.

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Working of E-mail
 Email working follows the client server approach. In this client is the mailer i.e. the
mail application or mail program and server is a device that manages emails.
 Following example will take you through the basic steps involved in sending and
receiving emails and will give you a better understanding of working of email system:

o Suppose person A wants to send an email message to person B.

o Person A composes the messages using a mailer program(MUA – Mail User
Agent) i.e. mail client and then select Send option.
o MUA push the mail using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to sender mail server.
o For example : Suppose person A’s mail address is abc@gmail.com and send
mail to Person B’s mail id xyz@yahoo.com. So mail first push to sender mail
server that is gmail server.
o That mail received by MSA (Mail submission Agent) at person A’s mail server
and then send to MTA(Mail Transmission Agent) using Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol.
o MSA and MTA are type of software installed at server. MSA is used to check
error(mail id is correct or not etc.) in mail.
o The message is routed to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to MTA at person B’s
mail server.
o Then MTA at receiver side send mail to MDA (Mail Delivery Agent) using SMTP
protocol and MDA store that mail to mailbox.
o Now, to read mail, MUA at receiver side use Post Office protocol version
3(POP3) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
o This message is now stored on person B’s PC.
 The following diagram gives pictorial representation of the steps discussed above:

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URL and URL types (Absolute, Relative)

 URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Any internet location available on server
is called a web URL, web address or website.
 Each website or webpage has a unique address called URL.
 type: It specifies the type of the server in which the file is located.
 address: It specifies the address or location of the internet server.
 path: It specifies the location of the file on the internet server.

 Types of URL: URL gives the address of files created for webpages or other
documents like an image, pdf for a doc file, etc.
 There are two types of URL:

 Absolute URL
 Relative URL

 Absolute URL: This type of URL contains both the domain name and directory/page
path. An absolute URL gives complete location information. It begins with a protocol
like “http://” and continues, including every detail.

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 Relative URL: This type of URL contains the path excluding the domain name.
Relative means “in relation to”, and a relative URL tells a URL location on terms of
the current location. Relative path is used for reference to a given link of a file that
exist within the same domain.
 For example, /images/img.jpg is telling the browser to go to the domain, then look
for the images folder, then find the img.jpg file inside the images folder. If you
update your domain your /images/img.jpg link does not need to be updated.

Concepts of search engine and purpose

 Search Engine refers to a huge database of internet resources such as web pages,
newsgroups, programs, images etc. It helps to locate information on World Wide
Web.
 User can search for any information by passing query in form of keywords. It then
searches for relevant information in its database and return to the user.

 Search Engine Components

 Generally there are three basic components of a search engine as listed below:
o Web Crawler
o Database
o Search Interfaces
 Web crawler: It is a software component that traverses the web to gather
Information.
 Database: All the information on the web is stored in database. It consists of huge
web resources.

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 Search Interfaces: This component is an interface between user and the database. It
helps the user to search through the database.

 Search Engine Working

 Web crawler, database and the search interface are the major component of a search
engine that actually makes search engine to work. Search engines make use of
Boolean expression AND, OR, NOT to restrict and widen the results of a search.
Following are the steps that are performed by the search engine:
 The search engine looks for the keyword in the index for predefined database instead
of going directly to the web to search for the keyword.
 It then uses software to search for the information in the database. This software
component is known as web crawler.
 Once web crawler finds the pages, the search engine then shows the relevant web
pages as a result. These retrieved web pages generally include title of page, size of
text portion, first several sentences etc.
 User can click on any of the search results to open it.
 These search criteria may vary from one search engine to the other. The retrieved
information is ranked according to various factors such as frequency of keywords,
relevancy of information, links etc.

 Examples
 Following are the several search engines available today:
 Google: It was originally called BackRub. It is the most popular search engine globally.
 Bing: It was launched in 2009 by Microsoft. It is the latest web-based search engine
that also delivers Yahoo’s results.

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 Ask: It was launched in 1996 and was originally known as Ask Jeeves. It includes
support for match, dictionary, and conversation question.
 AltaVista: It was launched by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1995. Since 2003, it is
powered by Yahoo technology.
 AOL: It is powered by Google.

Meta Search Engine

 A Meta-Search Engine (MSE) means instead of getting results from one search engine,
one will be getting the best combined results from a variety of engines and not just
any engines, but industry-leading engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing.

 Upon considering each existing search engine, a document or data that a MSE engine
can access are known as a “component” of that MSE. A meta-search may behave in a
similar fashion like any other typical search engine. A list of search-result record are
most relevant with the query will be displayed.
 When user querying, the MSE forwards the query to the appropriate component of
search engines through their search interfaces.
 When the contents related to the query are retrieved from all the individual search
engines then the results are reorganized into a single list and then returned back to
the user.

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 The advantage of MSE is that they are able to "communicate" to other search
engines, which contain relevant data. The language that they speak is HTML (Hyper
Text Markup Language), a set of codes which enables computers to read, translate,
transmit, and store data which is accessible to the entire world. Every Web page is
written in HTML using "tags".

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