How Internet email works

26 January 2006 | Publication | 3 Comments

This article is derived from a small section in a written teaching publication I did for a distance-learning course on computer networks.

You must know how to send an email to someone who has an email account, and retrieve emails from your email account, since the popularity of email is so great that it has became part of our daily life. However, you may not know every technical detail about how Internet email works. The following lists a number of important questions:

  • What is the sequence of events that takes place when you send an email to someone across the Internet?
  • What about the format of Internet email messages? This question includes how a message is defined, who defined it, and why it is defined in that way.
  • How is email content encoded and decoded?
  • You may have heard of some protocol names such as SMTP, POP3 and MIME, which are related to Internet email. What are their roles in the process of sending and retrieving an email?
  • You may also have heard of the terms ‘Mail User Agent (MUA)’ and ‘Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)’. So, what are they?

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3 Comments

  1. 1

    come and take a look~~! Finish~

    Dennis on 19/2/06 @ 12:24 am

  2. 2

    How Internet email works

    yanyancheng on 4/3/06 @ 8:37 pm

  3. 3

    updated

    Vincent Fok on 11/4/06 @ 7:56 pm