Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail
since approximately 1993,
is a method of exchanging digital messages from an
author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or
other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and
the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant
messaging. 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 connect
only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or
receive messages.
Historically, the term electronic mail was used generically
for any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the
early 1970s 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, the
message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header
contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email
address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is
also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time
stamp.
Originally a text-only (ASCII) communications medium,
Internet email was extended to carry, e.g., text in other character sets,
multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through
2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet
Mail Extensions (MIME). Subsequently, the IETF defined an internationalization
framework, e.g., Email Address Internationalization (eai), for using unencoded
UTF-8 in email.
Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet and
was in fact a crucial tool in creating it,[5] but the history of modern, global
Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for
encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion
from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the
current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a
basic text message sent on the Internet today.
Email, e-mail or electronic mail is the transmission of
messages (emails or email messages) over electronic networks like the internet.
I guess this dry definition is not what you've been looking
for. And indeed, it doesn't say or mean much, not to me either. This
"transmission of messages" could be anything. But don't let that
intimidate or confuse you. Email is as simple and straight forward as letter
writing.
Email and Postal Mail
To get a grasp of what email is its best — the terminology
indicates it — to think in equivalents of "traditional" postal mail.
The email message - Instead of using a pen to write a letter
on paper, you're using your keyboard to type an email message in an email
program on your computer.
Sending the email - When the email is finished and has been
addressed to the recipient's email address, you don't put a stamp on it and
post it but press the Send button in the email program. This makes the email
message go on its journey.
Email transport - Like postal services transport letters and
parcel, email servers transmit email messages from sender to recipient.
Usually, emails are not delivered to the recipient directly, though, but
waiting at the "nearest" mail server to be picked up by them.
Fetching new mail - If you've got new mail in your mailbox,
you go and fetch it. Similarly, your email program can check for new email
messages at your mail server and download them for you to read.
Every day, the citizens of the Internet send each other
billions of e-mail messages. If you're online a lot, you yourself may send a
dozen or more e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously,
e-mail has become an extremely popular communication tool.
Have you ever wondered how e-mail gets from your computer to
a friend halfway around the world? What is a POP3 server, and how does it hold
your mail? The answers may surprise you, because it turns out that e-mail is an
incredibly simple system at its core. In this article, we'll take an in-depth
look at e-mail and how it works.
An E-mail Message
According to Darwin Magazine: Prime Movers, the first e-mail
message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Prior to this, you
could only send messages to users on a single machine. Tomlinson's breakthrough
was the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @
sign to designate the receiving machine.
An e-mail message has always been nothing more than a simple
text message -- a piece of text sent to a recipient. In the beginning and even
today, e-mail messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to
add attachments now makes many messages quite long. Even with attachments,
however, e-mail messages continue to be text messages -- we'll see why when we
get to the section on attachments.
E-mail Clients
You've probably already received several e-mail messages
today. To look at them, you use some sort of e-mail client. Many people use well-known,
stand-alone clients like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Pegasus.
People who subscribe to free e-mail services like Hotmail or Yahoo use an
e-mail client that appears in a Web page. If you're an AOL customer, you use
AOL's e-mail reader. No matter which type of client you're using, it generally
does four things:
- Shows you a list of all of the messages in your mailbox by
displaying the message headers. The header shows you who sent the mail, the
subject of the mail and may also show the time and date of the message and the
message size.
- Let’s you select a message header and read the body of the
e-mail message.
- Let's you create new messages and send them. You type in the
e-mail address of the recipient and the subject for the message, and then type
the body of the message.
- Let’s you add attachments to messages you send and save the
attachments from messages you receive.
Sophisticated e-mail clients may have all sorts of bells and
whistles, but at the core, this is all that an e-mail client does.
Spelling
Electronic mail has several English spelling options that
occasionally prove cause for vehement disagreement.
E-mail is the most common form in print, and is recommended
by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides. According to Corpus
of Contemporary American English data, this is the form that appears most
frequently in edited, published American English and British English writing.
Email is the most common form used online, and is required
by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups and increasingly by style
guides. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.
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.
Email, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among
ARPANET users and the early developers of UNIX, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL,
GEnie, and Hotmail.
Email is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for
the "Author's Address", and is expressly required "for
historical reasons".
E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial letter E
as in similar abbreviations like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, H-bomb, and
C-section.
There is also some variety in the plural form of the term.
In US English email is used as a mass noun (like the term mail for items sent
through the postal system), but in British English it is more commonly used as
a count noun with the plural emails.
Origin
AUTODIN network provided message service between 1,350
terminals, handling 30 million messages per month, with an average message
length of approximately 3,000 characters.
Autodin was supported by 18 large
computerized switches, and was connected to the United States General Services
Administration Advanced Record System, which provided similar services to roughly
2,500 terminals.
Host-based mail
systems
With the introduction of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing
System (CTSS) in 1961 multiple users were able to log into a central system from
remote dial-up terminals, and to store and share files on the central disk.
Informal methods of using this to pass messages developed and were expanded to
create the first system worthy of the name "email":
- 1965 – MIT's CTSS MAIL.
- Other early systems soon had their own email applications:
- 1962 – 1440/1460 Administrative Terminal System
- 1968 – ATS/360
- 1972 – Unix mail program
- 1972 – APL Mailbox by Larry Breed
- 1974 – The PLATO IV Notes on-line message board system was
generalized to offer 'personal notes' (email) in August, 1974.
- 1978 – EMAIL at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New
Jersey
- 1981 – PROFS by IBM
- 1982 – ALL-IN-1 by Digital Equipment Corporation
Email networks
Soon systems were developed to link compatible mail programs
between different organizations’s over dialup modems or leased lines, creating
local and global networks.
In 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent, and through RFC
561, RFC 680, RFC 724, and finally 1977's RFC 733, became a standardized
working system.
Other, separate networks were also being created including:
- UNIX mail was networked by 1978's uucp, which was also used
for USENET newsgroup postings
- IBM mainframe email was linked by BITNET in 1981
- IBM PCs running DOS in 1984 could link with FidoNet for
email and shared bulletin board posting
Uses of Email
Flaming
Flaming occurs when a person sends a message with angry or
antagonistic content. The
term is derived from the use of the word Incendiary
to describe particularly heated email discussions. Flaming is assumed to be
more common today because of the ease and impersonality of email
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.
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 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 email inbox is being cleared out.
Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this
term, but he may only have popularized it.
In business
Email was widely accepted by the business community as the
first broad electronic communication medium and was the first 'e-revolution' in
business communication. Email is very simple to understand and like postal
mail, email 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 allows the small business user to have multiple users' email IDs with
just one email connection.
Pros
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. Email
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 synchronization: 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.
Email allows asynchrony: each participant may control their schedule
independently.
Cons
Most business workers today spend from one to two hours of
their working day on email: reading, ordering, sorting, and’re-contextualizing'
fragmented information, and writing email. The use of email is increasing due
to increasing levels of globalization – labor division and outsourcing amongst
other things. Email can lead to some well-known 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: Email is a push technology – the
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.
- Inconsistency: Email 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.
- Liability. Statements made in an email can be deemed legally
binding and be used against a party in a court of law.
Despite these disadvantages, email has become the most
widely used medium of communication within the business world. In fact, a 2010
study on workplace communication, found that 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt
that email was critical to their success and productivity at work.
Research on email
marketing
Research suggests that email marketing can be viewed as
useful by consumers if it contains information such as special sales offerings
and new product information. Offering interesting hyperlinks or generic
information on consumer trends is less useful. This research by Martin et al.
(2003) also shows that if consumers find email marketing useful, they are
likely to visit a store, thereby overcoming limitations of Internet marketing
such as not being able to touch or try on a product.
Problems
Speed of
correspondence
Despite its name implying that its use is faster than either
postal (physical) mail or telephone calls, correspondence over email often
varies incredibly steeply — ranging from communication that is indeed
semi-instant (often the fastest when a person is already sitting in front of a
computer with their email program open, or when the person has email services
automatically set up to speedily check for new messages on their mobile phone)
to communication that can quite literally take weeks or even months to garner a
response. In the case of the latter, it often proves much more rapid to call
the person via telephone or via some other means of audio. Therefore, as a
rule, unless one's workplace or social circle already communicates heavily via
email in a rapid manner, a person should assume that email runs a perpetual
risk of actually being slower as a communication mode than either mobile phone
or text messaging communication.
This general rule of thumb is often perplexing to those who
use email heavily but whose colleagues and friends do not. Meanwhile, some
people, due to exasperation with not getting responses to urgent messages, may
eventually decline to use email with any regularity at all, and may be put in
the sometimes-awkward position of having to notify their friends and colleagues
who do use email regularly, that this is not a good way to reach them.
Attachment size
limitation
Email messages may have one or more attachments, i.e., MIME
parts intended to provide copies of files. Attachments serve the purpose of
delivering binary or text files of unspecified size. In principle there is no
technical intrinsic restriction in the InternetMessage Format, SMTP protocol or
MIME 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 email, 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 people's professional lives" due to information overload, yet
"none of the current wave of high-profile Internet start-ups focused on
email really eliminates the problem of email overload because none helps us
prepare replies". GigaOm posted a similar article in September 2010,
highlighting research that found 57% of knowledge workers were overwhelmed by
the volume of email they received.
Technology investors reflect similar
concerns.
In October 2010, CNN published an article titled "Happy
Information Overload Day" that compiled research on email overload from IT
companies and productivity experts. According to Basex, the average knowledge
worker receives 93 emails a day. Subsequent studies have reported higher
numbers. Marsha Egan, an email productivity expert, called email technology
both a blessing and a curse in the article. She stated, "Everyone just
learns that they have to have it dinging and flashing and open just in case the
boss e-mails," she said. "The best gift any group can give each other
is to never use e-mail urgently. If you need it within three hours, pick up the
phone."
Spamming and computer
viruses
The usefulness of email is being threatened by four
phenomena: email bombardment, spamming, phishing, and email worms.
Spamming is unsolicited commercial (or bulk) email. Because
of the minuscule cost of sending email, spammers can send hundreds of millions
of email 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 email each day.
Email worms use email as a way of replicating themselves
into vulnerable computers. Although the first email worm affected UNIX
computers, the problem is most common today on the Microsoft Windows operating
system.
The combination of spam and worm programs results in users
receiving a constant drizzle of junk email, which reduces the usefulness of
email 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 email. 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.
Email spoofing
Email 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.
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 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.
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 while GPG, PGP, SMEmail, or S/MIME can be used for
end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer
Security/Secure Sockets Layer 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 such as SASL prevent this.
Finally, attached files share many of the same hazards as
those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain Trojans or
viruses.
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. (A complete Message Tracking mechanism was also defined, but it
never gained traction; see RFCs 3885 through 3888.)
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 so 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.
There are a number of systems that allow the sender to see
if messages have been opened. The receiver could also let the sender know that
the emails have been opened through an "Okay" button. A check sign
can appear in the sender's screen when the receiver's "Okay" button
is pressed.
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