Electronic mail (email or e-mail) :-

Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages

between people using electronic devices. Email entered its limited use in the 1960s,
with allowing user to send message only to the users of same computer. Some early
email systems required the author and the recipient, to be both
online simultaneously, similar to instant messaging.
The history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the
early ARPANET. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email. In 1971, he
developed the first system able to send mail between users, on different hosts across
the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By
the mid-1970s, it became the form recognized as email.
Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet. 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 to connect, typically to a mail
server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.
Originally an email was limited to ASCII text- communications medium only,
but later on Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content
attachments.

Terminology
Historically, the term electronic mail is any electronic document
transmission. Several writers in the early 1970s used the term to refer
to fax document transmission. The term electronic mail has been in use with its
current meaning since at least 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been
in use since at least 1979:

• email is now the common form, and recommended by style guides. It is the form
required by IETF Requests for Comments (RFC) and working groups. This
spelling also appears in most dictionaries.
• e-mail is the form favored in edited published American English and British
English writing as reflected in the Corpus of Contemporary American
English data, but is falling out of favor in some style guides.
• EMail is a traditional form used in RFCs for the "Author's Address" and is
required "for historical reasons"
• E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial E as in similar abbreviations
like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, and H-bomb
 In the original protocol, RFC 524, none of these forms was used. The service is
simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.
An Internet e-mail consists of an envelope and content; the content consists of a
header and a body.

Origin
Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent
of time-sharing computers in the early 1960s. Informal methods of using shared files
to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers
of early mainframe and minicomputers developed similar, but generally
incompatible, mail applications. Over the time, a complex web of gateways and
routing systems linked many of them. Many US universities were part of the
ARPANET (created in the late 1960s), which aimed at software portability between
its systems.
In 1971 the first ARPANET network email was sent, introducing the now-
familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system
address. The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was introduced in
1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Government Open Systems
Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) , was predominate. However, once the final
restrictions on carrying commercial traffic over the Internet ended in 1995, a
combination of factors made the current Internet suite of
SMTP, POP3 and IMAP email protocols the standard.

Operation
The following is a typical sequence of events that takes place when
sender A transmits a message using a mail user agent (MUA) addressed to the email
address of the recipient B.

1. The MUA formats the message in email format and uses the Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP), to send the message content to the local mail
submission agent (MSA), in this case smtp.a.org.
2. The MSA determines the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol
( in this case, bob@b.org —) which is a fully qualified domain address
(FQDA).

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 a domain name.
 The MSA resolves a domain name to determine the fully qualified domain
name of the mail server in the Domain Name System (DNS).

3. The DNS server for the domain b.org (ns.b.org) responds with any MX
records listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this
case mx.b.org, a message transfer agent (MTA) server run by the recipient's
ISP.
4. Smtp.a.org sends the message to mx.b.org using SMTP. This server may need
to forward the message to other MTAs before the message reaches the
final message delivery agent (MDA).
5. The MDA delivers it to the mailbox of user bob.
6. Bob's MUA picks up the message using either the Post Office
Protocol (POP3) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).

Message format
The basic Internet message format used for email is defined by RFC , with encoding
of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments collectively
called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. The extensions
in International email apply only to email.
Internet email messages consist of two sections, 'header' and 'body'. These are known
as 'content'. The header is structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date,
and other information about the email.
In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP
communicates delivery parameters and information using message header fields.
The body contains the message, as unstructured text, sometimes containing
a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
Message header
RFC specifies the syntax of the email header. Each email message has a header ,
comprising a number of fields ("header fields"). Each field has a name ("field name"
or "header field name"), followed by the separator character ":", and a value ("field
body" or "header field body").
Header fields
Email header fields can be multi-line, with each line recommended to be no more
than 78 characters, although the limit is 998 characters. The message header must
include at least the following fields:
• From: The email address, and, optionally, the name of the author(s). Some email
clients are changeable through account settings.
• Date: The local time and date the message was written. Like the From: field,
many email clients fill this in automatically before sending. The recipient's client
may display the time in the format and time zone local to them.

• To: The email address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message's recipient(s).
• Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are
commonly used in the subject, including "RE:" and "FW:".
• Cc: Carbon copy; Many email clients mark email in one's inbox differently
depending on whether they are in the To: or Cc: list.
• Bcc: Blind carbon copy; addresses are usually only specified during SMTP
delivery, and not usually listed in the message header.
• Content-Type: Information about how the message is to be displayed, usually
a MIME type.
• Precedence: commonly with values "bulk", "junk", or "list"; used to indicate
automated "vacation" or "out of office" responses should not be returned for this
mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from sent to all other subscribers of a
mailing list. Send mail uses this field to affect prioritization of queued email,
with "Precedence: special-delivery" messages delivered sooner. With modern
high-bandwidth networks, delivery priority is less of an issue than it
was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression
mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress field.[43]
• Message-ID: Also an automatic-generated field to prevent multiple deliveries
and for reference in In-Reply-To: (see below).
• In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to. Used to link related
messages together. This field only applies to reply messages.
• References: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to, and the message-id of
the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.
• Reply-To: Address should be used to reply to the message.
• Sender: Address of the sender acting on behalf of the author listed in the From:
field (secretary, list manager, etc.).
• Archived-At: A direct link to the archived form of an individual email message.
The To: field may be unrelated to the addresses to which the message is delivered.
The delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may
be extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at
the top of a conventional letter delivered according to the address on the outer
envelope. In the same way, the "From:" field may not be the sender. Some mail
servers apply email authentication systems to messages relayed. Data pertaining to
the server's activity is also part of the header, as defined below.
SMTP defines the trace information of a message saved in the header using the
following two fields:[44]

• Received: after an SMTP server accepts a message, it inserts this trace record at
the top of the header (last to first).
• Return-Path: after the delivery SMTP server makes the final delivery of a
message, it inserts this field at the top of the header.
Other fields added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace
fields.[45]

• Authentication-Results: after a server verifies authentication, it can save the

results in this field for consumption by downstream agents.[46]
• Received-SPF: stores results of SPF checks in more detail than Authentication-
Results.[47]
• DKIM-Signature: stores results of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)
decryption to verify the message was not changed after it was sent.[48]
• Auto-Submitted: is used to mark automatic-generated messages.[49]
• VBR-Info: claims VBR whitelisting[50]
Message body
Content encoding
Internet email was designed for 7-bit ASCII. Most email 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 and BINARY extensions were introduced to allow
transmission of mail without the need for these encodings, but many mail transport
agents may not support them. In some countries, several encoding schemes co-exist;
as the result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in
non-readable form (the only exception is a coincidence if the sender and receiver use
the same encoding scheme). Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is
growing in popularity.[citation needed]
Plain text and HTML[edit]
Most modern graphic email clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for
the message body at the option of the user. HTML email messages often include an
automatic-generated plain text copy for compatibility. 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 underlines and 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.[52]
Some web-based mailing lists recommend all posts be made in plain-text, with 72
or 80 characters per line for all the above reasons,[53][54] and because they have a
significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt.
Some Microsoft email clients may allow rich formatting using their proprietary Rich
Text Format (RTF), but this should be avoided unless the recipient is guaranteed to
have a compatible email client.[55]

Servers and client applications[edit]

The interface of an email client, Thunderbird.

Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered
to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, also sometimes
called local delivery agents, LDAs). Accepting a message obliges an MTA to deliver
it,[56] and when a message cannot be delivered, that MTA must send a bounce
message back to the sender, indicating the problem.
Users can retrieve their messages from servers using standard protocols such
as POP or IMAP, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with
a proprietary protocol specific to Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes or Microsoft
Exchange Servers. Programs used by users for retrieving, reading, and managing
email are called mail user agents (MUAs).
Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard
formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent email clients
use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer email
between them. Server-side storage is often in a proprietary format but since access
is through a standard protocol such as IMAP, moving email from one server to
another can be done with any MUA supporting the protocol.
Many current email users do not run MTA, MDA or MUA programs themselves,
but use a web-based email platform, such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, that performs
the same tasks.[57] Such webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any
standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on a local email client.
Filename extensions[edit]
Upon reception of email messages, email client applications save messages in
operating system files in the file system. Some clients save individual messages as
separate files, while others use various database formats, often proprietary, for
collective storage. A historical standard of storage is the mbox format. The specific
format used is often indicated by special filename extensions:
eml
Used by many email clients including Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Outlook
Express, Lotus notes, Windows Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Postbox. The
files contain the email contents as plain text in MIME format, containing the
email header and body, including attachments in one or more of several
formats.
emlx
Used by Apple Mail.
msg
Used by Microsoft Office Outlook and OfficeLogic Groupware.
mbx
Used by Opera Mail, KMail, and Apple Mail based on the mbox format.
Some applications (like Apple Mail) leave attachments encoded in
messages for searching while also saving separate copies of the
attachments. Others separate attachments from messages and save
them in a specific directory.
URI scheme mailto[edit]
Main article: mailto
The URI scheme, as registered with the IANA, defines
the mailto: scheme for SMTP email addresses. Though its use is not
strictly defined, URLs of this form are intended to be used to open the
new message window of the user's mail client when the URL is
activated, with the address as defined by the URL in
the To: field.[58][59] Many clients also support query string parameters
 for the other email fields, such as its subject line or carbon copy
recipients.[60]

Types: -

Web-based email:- Many email providers have a web-based email client

(e.g. AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail). They allows users to log
into the email account by using any compatible web browser to send and receive
their messages. Mail is typically not downloaded to the web client, so can't be read
without a current Internet connection.

POP3 email servers:-The Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) is a mail access protocol
used by a client application to read messages from the mail server. Received
messages are often deleted from the server. POP supports simple download-and-
delete requirements for access to remote mail boxes. POP3 allows you to download
email messages on your local computer and read them even when you are offline.

IMAP email servers:- The Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) provides
features to manage a mailbox from multiple devices. Small portable devices
like smartphones are increasingly used to check email while traveling and to make
brief replies, larger devices with better keyboard access being used to reply at greater
length. IMAP shows the headers of messages, the sender and the subject and the
device needs to request to download specific messages. Usually, the mail is left in
folders in the mail server.

MAPI email servers:- Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is

used by Microsoft Outlook to communicate to Microsoft Exchange Server - and to
a range of other email server products such as Axigen Mail Server, Kerio
Connect, Scalix, Zimbra, HPOpenMail, IBMLotusNotes, Zarafa, and Bynari where
vendors have added MAPI support to allow their products to be accessed directly
via Outlook.

Uses
1- Business and Organizational Use:-
 Email has been widely accepted by businesses, governments and non-
governmental organizations in the developed world, and is one of the key parts of
an 'e-revolution' in workplace communication in the era of adoption of
highspeed Internet.
It has some key benefits to business and other organizations, including:
Facilitating logistics: - Much of the business world relies on 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. Email provides a method of
exchanging information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that
is generally far less expensive than a physical meeting or phone call.

Helping with synchronization:- With real time communication by meetings or

phone calls, participants must work on the same schedule, and each participant must
spend the same amount of time in the meeting or call. Email allows asynchrony:
each participant may control their schedule independently.

Reducing cost:- Sending an email is much less expensive than sending postal mail,
or long distance telephone calls, telex or telegrams.

Increasing speed;- Much faster than most of the alternatives.

Creating a "written" record:- Unlike a telephone or in-person conversation, email

by its nature creates a detailed written record of the communication, the identity of
the sender(s) and recipient(s) and the date and time the message was sent. In the
event of a contract or legal dispute, saved emails can be used to prove that an
individual was advised of certain issues, as each email has the date and time recorded
on it.

Email marketing:- Email marketing via "opt-in" is often successfully used to send
special sales offerings and new product information. Depending on the recipient's
culture, email sent without permission—such as an "opt-in"—is likely to be viewed
as unwelcome "email spam".

2- Personal Use:-
Personal computer:-Many users access their personal emails from friends and
family members using a personal computer in their house or apartment.
Mobile:- Email has become used on smartphones and on all types of computers.
Mobile "apps" for email increase accessibility to the medium for users who are out
of their homes. While in the earliest years of email, users could only access email on
desktop computers, in the 2010s, it is possible for users to check their email when
they are away from home. Alerts can also be sent to the smartphone or other devices
to notify them immediately of new messages. This has given email the ability to be
used for more frequent communication between users and allowed them to check
and write messages throughout the day. As of 2011, there were approximately 1.4
billion email users worldwide and 50 billion non-spam emails sent daily.

Individuals often check emails on smartphones for both personal and work-
related messages. It was found that US adults check their email more than they
browse the web or check their Facebook accounts, making email the most popular
activity for users to do on their smartphones. 78% of the respondents in the study
revealed that they check their email on their phone. It was also found that 30% of
consumers use only their smartphone to check their email, and 91% were likely to
check their email at least once per day on their smartphone. However, the percentage
of consumers using email on a smartphone ranges and differs dramatically across
different countries. For example, in comparison to 75% of those consumers in the
US who used it, only 17% in India did.
Declining use among young people
As of 2010, the number of Americans visiting email web sites had fallen 6 percent
after peaking in November 2009. For persons 12 to 17, the number was down 18
percent. Young people preferred instant messaging, texting and social media.
Technology writers believe that email was like the VCR, vinyl records and film
cameras—no longer cool and something older people do.
A 2015 survey of Android users showed that persons 13 to 24 used
messaging apps 3.5 times as much as those over 45, and were far less likely to use
email.

Issues:-

Attachment size limitation:- Email messages may have one or more attachments,
which are additional files that are appended to the email. Typical attachments
include Microsoft Word documents, PDF documents and scanned images of paper
documents. In principle there is no technical restriction on the size or number of
attachments, but in practice email clients, servers and Internet service providers
implement various limitations on the size of files, or complete email - typically to
25MB or less. Furthermore, due to technical reasons, attachment sizes as seen by
these transport systems can differ to what the user sees, which can be confusing to
senders when trying to assess whether they can safely send a file by email. Where
larger files need to be shared, various file hosting services are available and
commonly used.

Information overload: - The ubiquity of email for knowledge workers and "white
collar" employees has led to concerns that recipients face an "information overload"
in dealing with increasing volumes of email. With the growth in mobile devices, by
default ,employees may also receive work-related emails outside of their working
day. This can lead to increased stress, decreased satisfaction with work, and some
observers even argue it could have a significant negative economic effect, as efforts
to read the many emails could reduce productivity.

Spam:- Email "spam" is unsolicited bulk email. The low cost of sending such email
meant that, by 2003, up to 30% of total email traffic was spam, and was threatening
the usefulness of email as a practical tool. The US CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and
similar laws elsewhere had some impact, and a number of effective anti-spam
techniques now largely mitigate the impact of spam by filtering or rejecting it for
most users, but the volume sent is still very high—and increasingly consists not of
advertisements for products, but malicious content or links. In September 2017, for
example, the proportion of spam to legitimate email rose to 59.56%.

Malware:-A range of malicious email types exist. These range from various types
of email scams, including "social engineering" scams such as advance-fee
scam "Nigerian letters", to phishing, email bombardment and email worms.

Email spoofing:- Email spoofing occurs when the email message header is designed
to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. Email
spam and phishing methods typically use spoofing to mislead the recipient about the
true message origin. Email spoofing may be done as a prank, or as part of a criminal
effort to defraud an individual or organization. An example of a potentially
fraudulent email spoofing is if an individual creates an email that appears to be an
invoice from a major company, and then sends it to one or more recipients. In some
cases, these fraudulent emails incorporate the logo of the purported organization and
even the email address may appear legitimate.
Email bombing:- Email 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.

Privacy concerns:- Today it can be important to distinguish between the Internet

and internal email systems. Internet email may travel and be stored on networks and
computers without the sender's or the recipient's control. During the transit time it
is possible that third parties read or even modify the content. Internal mail systems,
in which the information never leaves the organizational network, may be more
secure, although information technology personnel and others whose function may
involve monitoring or managing may be accessing the email of other employees.
Email privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:

• email messages are generally not encrypted.

• email 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 email 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 email can often identify
the sender, preventing anonymous communication.

web bugs invisibly embedded in email content can alert the sender of any email
whenever an email is read, or re-read, and from which IP address. It can also reveal
whether an email was read on a smartphone or a PC, or Apple Mac device via
the user agent string.
There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more
of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity
network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network
or end-to-end message encryption protocols or software’s can be used to encrypt
communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP
server.
Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords,
making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes
prevent this. Finally, the attached files share many of the same hazards as those
found in peer-to-peer files haring. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
Legal contracts:- Emails can now often be considered as binding contracts as well,
so users must be careful about what they send through email correspondence.

Flaming:-Flaming occurs when a person sends a message (or many messages) with
angry or antagonistic content. The term is derived from the use of the
word incendiary to describe particularly heated email discussions. The ease and
impersonality of email communications mean that the social norms that encourage
civility in person or via telephone do not exist and civility may be forgotten.

Email bankruptcy:- Also known as "email fatigue", email 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 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 their email inbox
is full, and that they are in the process of clearing out all the messages.

Internationalization:- Originally Internet email was completely ASCII text-based.

MIME now allows body content text and some header content text in international
character sets, but other headers and email addresses using UTF-8, while
standardized have yet to be widely adopted.

Tracking of sent mail:-

The original SMTP mail service provides limited mechanisms for tracking a
transmitted message, and none for verifying that it has been delivered or read. It
requires that each mail server must either deliver it onward or return a failure notice
(bounce message), but both software bugs and system failures can cause messages
to be lost. To remedy this, the IETF introduced Delivery Status
Notifications (delivery receipts) and Message Disposition Notifications (return
receipts); however, these are not universally deployed in production.
Many ISPs now deliberately disable non-delivery reports (NDRs) and delivery
receipts due to the activities of spammers:

• Delivery Reports can be used to verify whether an address exists and if so,
this indicates to a spammer that it is available to be spammed.
• If the spammer uses a forged sender email address (email spoofing), then the
innocent email address that was used can be flooded with NDRs from the many
invalid email addresses the spammer may have attempted to mail. These NDRs then
constitute spam from the ISP to the innocent user.
In the absence of standard methods, a range of system based around the use of web
bugs have been developed. However, these are often seen as underhand or raising
privacy concerns, and only work with email clients that support rendering of HTML.

COMPUTER APPLICATIONS:-
Email:-
Most commonly referred to as email for email is a method of exchanging digital
messages from one person to another or more recipients. Modern email operates
across the internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems require
that the author and the recipient or recipient to be online at the same time to send
and receive messages through email. But nowadays email system are based on a
store and forward model. Email servers accept forward deliver request and store
messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online
simultaneously. They need to connect only to a mail server for so long as it takes
to send or receive messages. A mail server is a computer that acts as an electronic
post office for sending and receiving emails. The mail which is exchanged across
networks passes between mail servers that run on specially designed software’s.
Historically, the term electronic mail was used generally for any electronic
document transmission e.g several writers in the early seventies used the term to
describe fax document transmission. As a result it is difficult to find the first
citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today.
An internet email message consists of three components. These three components or