Emails

So, email, how do it work? Well... my homework was to find out. So here is what i have come up with- Enjoy =]


E-mail is the internets most widely used application, as well as being one of the oldest. The majority of emails sent everyday are business related.
Knowing that emails have become very important, it's surprising that many people don't actually know how an e-mail works. The process is VERY confusing on many differnet levels, but the basics on how the mail travels from point A to point B is quite easy to understand.

Sending Mail
· When sending an email, your email program will connect to you internet.
· Internet has traffic, so your email could be split into different ‘packets’.- these smaller packets can travel faster from server to server.
· These smaller packets are then put back together when they richer their destination..

Sorting the Mail
-The emails are sorted by their Domain. For the e-mail address complaints@tesco.com, for example, the domain is the tesco.com portion.
-The domain identifies where the message needs to go.
-Each domain name maps to a unique Web address, called an Internet Protocol (IP) address, this is a string of numbers which identifies each server.
- When the e-mail server gets a message, it looks at the domain and checks the registry to determine what IP address to send the message to (sort of like checking your ZIP code to make sure letters go to the correct place). Once it determines the proper destination, the e-mail message is sent on its way.

Delivering the Mail
- Depending on where the server is you want it to be sent to, the original e-mail server may not actually make the final handoff. It is likely that the message will travel between through many points before reaching its final destination. Each "hop" identifies the domain, and passes the message to another transfer point. This process is repeated ( with each 'hop' your email is getting closer to the desiered server) until the correct server is reached.
- Once a message reaches the appropriate domain server, it's channeled into the right e-mail account and stored until the user logs in and checks for mail.

FINALLY

-When the account which you have (either hotmail,gmail or yahoo) tells his or her e-mail program, like Microsoft Outlook, to check for new mail, the e-mail program shall connect to the e-mail programs server, the person can then check their inbox and any awaiting emails will be shown.
The e-mail has reached it final destination, with all of this taking place in a matter of seconds!

Research links:

First recearch page, here

Second research page, here