What Is Email?

Date First Published: 18th February 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Network Services

Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 1/10

Learn more about what email is in this article.

Short for electronic mail, email is a way of sending and receiving messages over the internet and is one of the most commonly used features. Emails allow the sending of emails to any recipient who has an email address, regardless of their location or distance. Email addresses usually look like: '[email protected]'. They are a useful way of communicating online and are similar to letters on a hard copy, except that they are accessed online. Every email account has a username, password, and mail server, which configures where the messages will be sent and received.

Email Protocols

Emails use the TCP/IP protocol to send and receive messages. The three main email protocols that are used include:

• SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) - This protocol is used for transferring outgoing mail from one server to another. It is only used for sending email, not receiving. Therefore, the server that the email is sent to is known as an SMTP server.
• POP3 - (Post Office Protocol) - This protocol is used for receiving email, not sending. It works in a similar way to mail in a post office. POP3 is responsible for downloading mail from the server to the computer. After the mail has been downloaded, it will no longer be on the server and there will only be one copy.
• IMAP - (Internet Message Access Protocol) - An alternative to POP3. It is used for receiving mail. When the emails have been downloaded to the computer, IMAP will leave a copy on the server. As a result, this allows multiple devices to access the same email account. When an email is deleted by the user, it will be deleted from all other devices and moving mail to different folders will also be synchronised across all devices.

Popularity

Electronic mail is a popular way for two or more users to communicate around the world without the use of any paper. Before email, or any form of electronic communication existed, people had to write letters on paper in order for them to communicate with people that are far away. Overall, electronic mail is better for the environment in that it does not require any paper or ink. However, it is inaccessible when there are any technical issues, like a slow internet connection or problems with the devices. As of now, there are over 3.9 billion email accounts, with 2.5 billion of them being actively used and over 293 billion emails sent on a daily basis.

Security

Electronic mail can have security risks in that it is possible for anyone that has an email account and internet access to send someone an email if they know their email address. Because of this, electronic mail can be used to send viruses, malware, spam and phishing emails.

Email attachments could contain viruses that harm other computers. However, catching a virus from just viewing an email message in a web browser or an email application is quite rare now, due to the way most reputable email providers work. For security reasons, no secure email providers allow scripting and code is automatically filtered out. Attachments and links are where computers catch viruses, so catching a computer virus from an email message will always require some user interaction, such as running a downloaded file, especially a file with the .exe extension, since they are executable files that run code when opened. For more information about whether it is possible to get a virus by opening an email message, see this article.

History

Electronic mail has been around since 1971. On 29th October 1969, the first message was sent from one computer to another on ARPANET. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an American computer programmer developed email by creating ARPANET’s networked email system. The arrival of internal networks caused the protocols for sending messages to become more complex. Ray Tomlinson’s most notable contribution to email is the '@' symbol, used to indicate a destination for a message. The '@' symbol has been used throughout the time that email has existed. 75% of ARPANET traffic was electronic mail by 1976. By 1993, the word 'electronic mail' had been abbreviated to 'email' and the word became more commonly used.

Over the next few years, the introduction of several companies, such as AOL, Echomail, Hotmail, and Yahoo greatly increased the number of electronic mail users. By the late 1990s, internet use significantly increased from 55 million users in 1990 to 400 million by 1999. However, the increase in popularity increased the risks of spam, viruses, malware, and phishing. As a result, this created the need for email and spam filtering software, which automatically identifies spam messages and moves them to a junk folder.

Major Email Account Providers

Below is a table of six major email providers along with their storage limit and maximum attachment size.

Is It Spelt 'Email' Or 'E-mail'?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Spelling the word as 'email' or 'e-mail' is a matter of style and a personal choice. In this article, the name for electronic messages that can be sent from one computer to another was spelt 'email' for simplicity.

Additional Features and Terms

Additional features and terms of electronic mail are:

• CC (Carbon Copy) - This allows a copy of the email message to be sent to additional recipients.
• BCC (Blank carbon copy) - This works in the same way as CC as it creates a carbon copy of the email message, but it sends the copies to multiple people without the recipients knowing who else received the email. This may be used for privacy reasons when sending emails to a large number of people.
• Junk folder - Also known as the spam folder, this is the folder where spam, phishing, or unwanted mail automatically gets moved to. In most cases, identified spam or junk mail is automatically filtered and moved to the junk folder and gets deleted after a certain period of time. When opening an email that is in the junk folder, links and other functionality will be disabled for safety. Emails may also appear in the junk folder when it is the first time the sender is sending a user an email.
• Recipient - The intended user that the email message will be delivered to.
• Sender - The person who is sending the email.

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