Electronic mail, commonly called email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital (or analog) systems use a continuous range of values to represent information. Although digital representations are discrete, the information represented can be either discrete, such as numbers, letters or icons, or continuous, such as sounds, images, and messages across the Internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and or other computer networks A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of computers and devices connected by communications channels that facilitates communications among users and allows users to share resources with other users. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics. This article provides a general. Originally, email was transmitted directly from one user to another computer. This required both computers to be online The terms "online" and "offline" have specific meanings in regards to computer technology and telecommunications. In general, "online" indicates a state of connectivity, while "offline" indicates a disconnected state. In common usage, "online" often refers to the Internet or the World Wide Web at the same time, a la instant messenger The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of instant messaging clients. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date. External links lead to extensions that add a feature to a client. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in a networking context, verifies the integrity of the message before forwarding it. In general, this model. Email servers A server computer, sometimes called an enterprise server, is a computer system that provides essential services across a network, to private users inside a large organization or to public users in the internet accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Users no longer need be online simultaneously and need only connect briefly, typically to an email server Within Internet message handling services , a message transfer agent or mail transfer agent (MTA) or mail relay is a computer process or software agent that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another, in single hop application-level transactions. An MTA implements both the client (sending) and server (receiving) portions of, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.
An email message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address An e-mail address identifies an email box to which e-mail messages may be delivered. An e-mail address on the modern Internet looks like, for example, jsmith@example.com and is usually read as "jsmith at example dot com". Many earlier e-mail systems used different address formats and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field.
Originally a text-only communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC In computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME's use, however, has grown beyond describing the content of e-mail to describing content type in general, including for the web (MIME).
The history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET ARPANET , created by a small research team at the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and one of the networks that came to compose the global Internet. The packet switching. 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 one sent on the Internet today.
Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications, which solves the problem of different end host (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 15) (1982), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP is specified for (SMTP), first published as Internet standard In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.
Contents |
Spelling
There are several spelling Spelling is the writing of a word or words with the necessary letters and diacritics present in an accepted standard order. It is one of the elements of orthography and a prescriptive element of alphabetic languages. Most spellings attempt to approximate a transcribing of the sounds of the language into alphabetic letters; however, completely variations that occasionally prove cause for surprisingly vehement disagreement.[2][3]
- email is the form required by IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and managers are Requests for Comment and working groups[4] This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.[5][6][7][8][9][10]
- e-mail is a form recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. The implementation of a style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.[11][12]
- 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.[13][14][15]
- eMail, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T as well as various commercial vendors and non-profit, CMS, AppleLink AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computer's online service for its dealers, third party developers, and users, and the client software used to access it. Prior to the commercialization of the Internet, AppleLink was a popular service for Mac and Apple IIGS users. The service was offered from about 1986 to 1994 to various groups, before being, eWorld eWorld was an online service operated by Apple Inc. between June 1994 and March 1996. The services included email , news, and a bulletin board system (Community Center). Users of eWorld were often referred to as "ePeople", AOL AOL Inc. , formerly known as America Online and logo typeset as "Aol.", is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions, GEnie GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS (now GXS) that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users. It was one of the pioneering services in the field, though eventually replaced by the Internet and graphics-based services,, and Hotmail Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Launching in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL" and funded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, it.[citation needed]
- EMail is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address",[14][15] and is expressly required "...for historical reasons...".[16]
Origin
Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it.
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space- first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System The Compatible Time-Sharing System, or the CTSS, was one of the first time-sharing operating systems; it was developed at MIT's Computation Center. CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961, and was operated at MIT until 1973. During part of this time, MIT's Project MAC had a second copy of CTSS, but the system did not spread beyond two sites . CTSS was (CTSS) in 1961.[17] It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094 The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. The first 7090 installation was in November 1959. In 1960, a[18] from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. Email started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing mainframe computer Mainframes are powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing to communicate. Among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's System Development Corporation , based in Santa Monica, California, was arguably the world's first computer software company.[citation needed] Q32 The Q-32 was installed at System Development Corporation headquarters, Santa Monica, California and was used as a development machine for the compiler and operational software for the AN/FSQ-31V, which was used as the Data Processing Element of the SAC Automated Command and Control System and MIT's CTSS.
Host-based mail systems
| This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be and removed. (August 2010) |
The original email systems allowed communication only between users who logged into the same host or "mainframe". This could be hundreds or even thousands of users within an organization.
By 1966 (or earlier, it is possible that the SAGE The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment was an automated control system for tracking and intercepting enemy bomber aircraft used by NORAD from the late 1950s into the 1980s. In later versions, the system could automatically direct aircraft to an interception by sending instructions directly to the aircraft's autopilot system had something similar some time before), such systems allowed email between different organizations, so long as they ran compatible operating systems.
Examples include BITNET BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University. The first network link was between CUNY and Yale, IBM PROFS OfficeVision is an IBM proprietary office support application that primarily runs on IBM's VM operating system and its user interface CMS. Other platform versions are available, notably OV/MVS and OV/400. OfficeVision provides e-mail, shared calendars, and shared document storage and management, and it provides the ability to integrate word, Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American computer company, a leading vendor in the minicomputer market though the 1960s and 1970s, and for a long time one of the most admired within the hacker community.[citation needed] ALL-IN-1 ALL-IN-1 was an office automation product developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s. HP now maintains the current version Office Server V3.2 for OpenVMS Alpha and OpenVMS VAX systems and the original Unix mail.
LAN-based mail systems
| This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be and removed. (August 2010) |
From the early 1980s, networked personal computers A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator. This is in contrast to the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed large expensive mainframe on LANs A local area network is a computer network covering a small physical area, like a home, office, or small groups of buildings, such as a school, or an airport. The defining characteristics of LANs, in contrast to wide area networks (WANs), include their usually higher data-transfer rates, smaller geographic area, and lack of a need for leased became increasingly important. Server-based systems similar to the earlier mainframe systems were developed. Again these systems initially allowed communication only between users logged into the same server infrastructure. Eventually these systems could also be linked between different organizations, as long as they ran the same email system and proprietary protocol.
Examples include cc:Mail, Lantastic LANtastic is a peer-to-peer local area network operating system for DOS, Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and OS/2. LANtastic supports Ethernet, ARCNET and Token Ring adapters as well as its original twisted-pair adapter at 2 Mbit/s, WordPerfect Office WordPerfect Office is an office suite developed by Corel Corporation. As of April 2008, the latest version is WordPerfect Office X4 , which is available in various editions, including Standard, Professional, Home & Student and Family Pack Edition. WordPerfect Office 12 Small Business Edition, including a wider range of applications, including, Microsoft Mail, Banyan VINES Banyan VINES was a computer network operating system and the set of computer network protocols it used to talk to client machines on the network. The Banyan company based the VINES operating system on Unix, and the network protocols on the archetypical Xerox XNS stack. VINES formed one of a group of XNS-based systems which also included Novell and Lotus Notes Lotus Notes is the client side of a client–server, collaborative application developed and sold by IBM Software Group. IBM describes the software as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications on [an] IBM Lotus Domino server." Prior to release 4.5, the term Lotus Notes referred to both - with various vendors supplying gateway software to link these incompatible systems.
Attempts at interoperability
| This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be and removed. (August 2010) |
- Novell Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services corporation headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company specializes in enterprise operating systems, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Novell NetWare; identity, security, and systems management solutions; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise and Novell Pulse briefly championed the open MHS MHS was a very 'open' system, and this, with Novell's encouragement, made it popular in the early 1990s as a 'glue' between not only the proprietary email systems of the day such as PROFS, SNADS, MCI, 3+Mail, cc:Mail, Para-Mail and Microsoft Mail protocol but abandoned it after purchasing the non-MHS WordPerfect Office (renamed Groupwise GroupWise is a messaging and collaborative software platform from Novell that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The platform consists of the client software, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and the server software, which is supported on Windows Server,)
- uucp UUCP is an abbreviation for Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, UUCP is one of the programs in the suite; it provides a user interface for requesting file copy operations. The UUCP was used as an open "glue" between differing mail systems
- The Coloured Book protocols The Coloured Book protocols were a set computer network protocols used on the SERCnet and JANET X.25 packet-switched academic networks in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1992. The name originated with each protocol being identified by the colour of the cover of its specification document on UK The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland[note 7] is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of the island of Ireland, and many small islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land academic networks until 1992
- X.400 X.400 is a suite of ITU-T Recommendations that define standards for Data Communication Networks for Message Handling Systems — more commonly known as "e-mail". While X.400 never achieved the universal presence of Internet e-mail, it has seen use within organizations, and as part of proprietary e-mail products such as Microsoft Exchange in the early 1990s was mandated for government use under GOSIP but almost immediately abandoned by all but a few — in favour of Internet SMTP
From SNDMSG to MSG
In the early 1970s, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy files over the network. Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, updated READMAIL and called the program RD. Barry Wessler then updated RD and called it NRD.[citation needed]
Marty Yonke combined SNDMSG and NRD to include reading, sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD. John Vittal then updated this version to include message forwarding and an Answer command to create replies with the correct address, and called it MSG. With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first modern email program, from which many other applications have descended.[19]
|
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:44:41 GMT+00:00
that Donates to Charity PR Wall Street GiveBackMail is a new email service that donates to charity each time you send an email . GiveBackMail offer the same core features as any other email ... Help change the world, one email at a time PressReleasesOnline.Net (press release) (blog)
Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:08:18 PDT
Twitter's great. SMS messaging is great. Even Instant Messaging is great. But, there's one thing which ties everyone together online. It ... gotdrupal.com.
Tom
ue, 31 Aug 2010 09:39:40 GM
Google's free . e. -. mail. service Gmail, has been updated with a new priority mail system called Gmail Priority Inbox. The optional service works in a similar way to their anti-spam feature, but places the important mail at the top of your ...
