Emails: what, why and where?
Posted on 12. Jun, 2008 by Robert Jooste in Email
What are emails? I’m sure most of you know. Electronic Mail. Messages that are sent over the internet to a Email address.
Why would you need an email address? Simple, it makes life easier. Once you have an email address you can send and receive mail instantly. Stay updated with the world, and a whole bunch of other bonuses.
Where? There are so many free email services out there that its almost hard to choose from. You need to have a look at what storage space you have with those email providers. What kind of spam filtering do they have? Is it fast, reliable, user friendly and so on.
I for one, use Gmail.com. I find their interface easy to use, works well and never goes down. It has basically unlimited storage, and the list goes on.
Then you get:
Hotmail
AIM mail
Yahoo mail
Bluebottle
inbox.com
Just about every company in the world today have email addresses. They are normally Name @company .com. thats all great. but you will, most probably, want/need an email address for yourself.
With all mail, you can have it sothat the emails can be displayed on the internet with any computer through a browser. or you can have it set up to download the messages for you to an email client such as Microsoft outlook.
The way emails work:
When you send an email, it does not go directly to that person. there are a few steps involved. Like sending a normal letter. The letter goes from you to the post office, from there it gets sorted and then leaves to go to the recipients post box. Then the recipient needs to go out and fetch the mail sothat he can read it. The same with emails.
when you send and email from your machine, it first goes through what they call a SMTP server. (simple mail transfer protocol) That is used when sending an email. After the SMTP server receives the messages, it then does a quick search to find out where the messages need to go. Once it has found it, it sends the messages to the server on the other side. From there, the recipient needs to “fetch” his mail. Then his outlook client, (or any other) goes out and fetches the messages from its server using POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3)
*note: the SMTP server and the POP3 server can be the same server.
Once the person has received the message he opens it an reads what you have to say to him.
All of this takes place within a couple of seconds. Maybe a minute.
So there you have it. Thats what emails are, and how they work.
Robert
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