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Electronic mail has several English spelling options that occasionally prove cause for surprisingly vehement disagreement.[3][4]
email is the form required by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups[5] and increasingly by style guides.[6][7][8] This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.[9][10][11][12][13][14]
e-mail is a form previously recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides. According to Corpus of Contemporary American English data, this form appears most frequently in edited, published American English writing.[15]
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.[16][17][18]
eMail, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and Hotmail.[citation needed]
EMail is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address",[17][18] and is expressly required "for historical reasons".[19]
E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial letter E as in similar abbreviations like A-bomb, H-bomb, and C-section.[20]
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.[citation needed]
Tags:Rfc,Arpanet,Spelling,Ietf,Requests For Comment,Style Guides,Corpus Of Contemporary American English,Unix,Cms,Applelink,Eworld,Aol,Genie,Hotmail,Mass Noun,Count Noun,Mail,Address, | |
| Precursors | |
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Sending text messages electronically could be said to date back to the Morse code telegraph of the mid 1800s; and the 1939 New York World's Fair, where IBM sent a letter of congratulations from San Francisco to New York on an IBM radio-type, calling it a high-speed substitute for mail service in the world of tomorrow.[21] Teleprinters were used in Germany during World War II[22], and use spread until the late 1960s when there was a worldwide Telex network. Additionally, there was the similar but incompatible American TWX, which remained important until the late 1980s.[23]
Tags:Morse Code,1939 New York World's Fair,Ibm,Teleprinters,Telex Network, | |
| Host-based mail systems | |
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With the introduction of MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961[24] for the first time multiple users were able to log into a central system[25] from remote dial-up terminals, and to store, and share, files on the central disk.[26]
Informal methods of using this to pass messages developed—and were expanded to create the first true email system:
MIT's CTSS MAIL, in 1965.[27]
Other early time-sharing system soon had their own email applications:
1972 - Unix mail program[28][29]
1972 - APL Mailbox by Larry Breed[30][31]
1981 - PROFS by IBM
1982 - ALL-IN-1[32] by Digital Equipment Corporation
Although similar in concept, all these original email systems had widely different features and ran on incompatible systems. They allowed communication only between users logged into the same host or "mainframe" - although this could be hundreds or even thousands of users within an organization.
Tags:Mit,Compatible Time-sharing System,Ctss,Larry Breed,Profs,All-in-1,Digital Equipment Corporation,Mailbox, | |
| Email networks | |
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Soon systems were developed to link compatible mail programs between different organisations over dialup modems or leased lines, creating local and global networks.
In 1971 the first ARPANET email was sent,[33] 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,[34] 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
Early email management systems in distributed environments have been developed to provide enhanced email features such as group directory, mailbox folder and privilege:
The database-driven system, called EMAIL, was developed in 1978 by Shiva Ayyadurai as part of his study at Livingston High School, New Jersey. It was fully deployed to use in two campuses of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in 1981.[35][36]
Tags:Uucp,Usenet,Bitnet,Fidonet,Privilege,Shiva Ayyadurai,Livingston High School,University Of Medicine And Dentistry Of New Jersey,Usenet News, | |
| LAN email systems | |
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In the early 1980s, networked personal computers on LANs 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. Examples include:
cc:Mail
Lantastic
WordPerfect Office
Microsoft Mail
Banyan VINES
Lotus Notes
Eventually these systems too could also be linked between different organizations, as long as they ran the same email system and proprietary protocol.[37]
Tags:Personal Computers,Lans,Cc:mail,Lantastic,Wordperfect Office,Microsoft Mail,Banyan Vines,Lotus Notes,Microsoft, | |
| Attempts at interoperability | |
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010)
Early interoperability among independent systems included:
ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet, defined the first protocols for dissimilar computers to exchange email
uucp implementations for non-Unix systems were used as an open "glue" between differing mail systems, primarily over dialup telephones
CSNet used dial-up telephone access to link additional sites to the ARPANET and then Internet
Later efforts at interoperability standardization included:
Novell briefly championed the open MHS protocol but abandoned it after purchasing the non-MHS WordPerfect Office (renamed Groupwise)
The Coloured Book protocols on UK academic networks until 1992
X.400 in the 1980s and early 1990s was promoted by major vendors and mandated for government use under GOSIP but abandoned by all but a few — in favor of Internet SMTP by the mid-1990s.
Tags:Internet,Verification,Reliable Sources,Challenged,Csnet,Novell,Mhs,Groupwise,Coloured Book Protocols,Uk,X.400,Gosip,Smtp, | |
| From SNDMSG to MSG | |
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In the early 1970s, Ray Tomlinson updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy messages (as files) over the network. Lawrence Roberts, the project manager for the ARPANET development, took the idea of READMAIL, which dumped all "recent" messages onto the user's terminal, and wrote a program for TENEX in TECO macros called RD which permitted accessing individual messages.[38] Barry Wessler then updated RD and called it NRD.[39]
Marty Yonke combined rewrote NRD to include reading, access to SNDMSG for sending, and a help system, and called the utility WRD which was later known as BANANARD. John Vittal then updated this version to include 3 important commands: Move (combined save/delete command), Answer (determined to whom a reply should be sent) and Forward (send an email to a person who was not already a recipient). The system was called MSG. With inclusion of these features, MSG is considered to be the first integrated modern email program, from which many other applications have descended.[38]
Tags:Sndmsg,Lawrence Roberts,Teco,Ray Tomlinson, | |
| Rise of ARPANET mail | |
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The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of email. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system email transfers began shortly after its creation in 1969.[27] Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10. The two machines were placed next to each other.[40][41] Tomlinson's work was quickly adopted across the ARPANET, which significantly increased the popularity of email. For many years, email was the killer app of the ARPANET and then the Internet.
Most other networks had their own email protocols and address formats; as the influence of the ARPANET and later the Internet grew, central sites often hosted email gateways that passed mail between the Internet and these other networks. Internet email addressing is still complicated by the need to handle mail destined for these older networks. Some well-known examples of these were UUCP (mostly Unix computers), BITNET (mostly IBM and VAX mainframes at universities), FidoNet (personal computers), DECNET (various networks) and CSNET a forerunner of NSFNet.
An example of an Internet email address that routed mail to a user at a UUCP host:
hubhost!middlehost!edgehost!user@uucpgateway.somedomain.example.com
This was necessary because in early years UUCP computers did not maintain (and could not consult central servers for) information about the location of all hosts they exchanged mail with, but rather only knew how to communicate with a few network neighbors; email messages (and other data such as Usenet News) were passed along in a chain among hosts who had explicitly agreed to share data with each other. (Eventually the UUCP Mapping Project would provide a form of network routing database for email.)
Tags:Email Address,Servers,Computer Network,@,Dec-10,Killer App,Gateways,Decnet, | |
| Operation overview | |
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The diagram to the right shows a typical sequence of events[42] that takes place when Alice composes a message using her mail user agent (MUA). She enters the email address of her correspondent, and hits the "send" button.
Her MUA formats the message in email format and uses the Submission Protocol (a profile of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), see RFC 6409) to send the message to the local mail submission agent (MSA), in this case smtp.a.org, run by Alice's internet service provider (ISP).
The MSA looks at the destination address provided in the SMTP protocol (not from the message header), in this case bob@b.org. An Internet email address is a string of the form localpart@exampledomain. The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, often the username of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is a domain name or a fully qualified domain name. The MSA resolves a domain name to determine the fully qualified domain name of the mail exchange server in the Domain Name System (DNS).
The DNS server for the b.org domain, ns.b.org, responds with any MX records listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this case mx.b.org, a message transfer agent (MTA) server run by Bob's ISP.
smtp.a.org sends the message to mx.b.org using SMTP.
This server may need to forward the message to other MTAs before the message reaches the final message delivery agent (MDA).
The MDA delivers it to the mailbox of the user bob.
Bob presses the "get mail" button in his MUA, which picks up the message using either the Post Office Protocol (POP3) or the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP4).
That sequence of events applies to the majority of email users. However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to the email system:
Alice or Bob may use a client connected to a corporate email system, such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. These systems often have their own internal email format and their clients typically communicate with the email server using a vendor-specific, proprietary protocol. The server sends or receives email via the Internet through the product's Internet mail gateway which also does any necessary reformatting. If Alice and Bob work for the same company, the entire transaction may happen completely within a single corporate email system.
Alice may not have a MUA on her computer but instead may connect to a webmail service.
Alice's computer may run its own MTA, so avoiding the transfer at step 1.
Bob may pick up his email in many ways, for example logging into mx.b.org and reading it directly, or by using a webmail service.
Domains usually have several mail exchange servers so that they can continue to accept mail when the main mail exchange server is not available.
Email messages are not secure if email encryption is not used correctly.
Many MTAs used to accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was very important in the early days of the Internet when network connections were unreliable. If an MTA couldn't reach the destination, it could at least deliver it to a relay closer to the destination. The relay stood a better chance of delivering the message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by people sending unsolicited bulk email and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and many MTAs don't accept messages from open mail relays because such messages are very likely to be spam.
Tags:Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, | |
| Message format | |
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The Internet email message format is defined in RFC 5322, with multi-media content attachments being defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. Prior to the introduction of RFC 2822 in 2001, the format described by RFC 822 was the standard for Internet email for nearly 20 years. RFC 822 was published in 1982 and based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET (see).[43]
Internet email messages consist of two major sections:
Header — Structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email.
Body — The basic content, as unstructured text; sometimes containing a signature block at the end. This is exactly the same as the body of a regular letter.
The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
Tags:Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, | |
| Message header | |
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Each message has exactly one header, which is structured into fields. Each field has a name and a value. RFC 5322 specifies the precise syntax.
Informally, each line of text in the header that begins with a printable character begins a separate field. The field name starts in the first character of the line and ends before the separator character ":". The separator is then followed by the field value (the "body" of the field). The value is continued onto subsequent lines if those lines have a space or tab as their first character. Field names and values are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.
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| Header fields | |
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2010)
Email header fields can be multi-line, and each line must be at most 76 characters long. Header fields can only contain US-ASCII characters; for encoding characters in other sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 can be used.[44] Recently the IETF EAI working group has defined some experimental extensions to allow Unicode characters to be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such characters must only be used by servers that support these extensions.[citation needed]
The message header must include at least the following fields:[45]
From: The email address, and optionally the name of the author(s). In many email clients not changeable except through changing account settings.
Date: The local time and date when the message was written. Like the From: field, many email clients fill this in automatically when sending. The recipient's client may then display the time in the format and time zone local to him/her.
The message header should include at least the following fields:[46]
Message-ID: Also an automatically generated field; used to prevent multiple delivery and for reference in In-Reply-To: (see below).
In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to. Used to link related messages together. This field only applies for reply messages.
RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional message header field names, including also fields defined for MIME, netnews, and http, and referencing relevant RFCs. Common header fields for email include:
To: The email address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message's recipient(s). Indicates primary recipients (multiple allowed), for secondary recipients see Cc: and Bcc: below.
Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are commonly used in the subject, including "RE:" and "FW:".
Bcc: Blind Carbon Copy; addresses added to the SMTP delivery list but not (usually) listed in the message data, remaining invisible to other recipients.
Cc: Carbon copy; Many email clients will mark email in your inbox differently depending on whether you are in the To: or Cc: list.
Content-Type: Information about how the message is to be displayed, usually a MIME type.
Precedence: commonly with values "bulk", "junk", or "list"; used to indicate that automated "vacation" or "out of office" responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from being sent to all other subscribers of a mailinglist. Sendmail uses this header to affect prioritization of queued email, with "Precedence: special-delivery" messages delivered sooner. With modern high-bandwidth networks delivery priority is less of an issue than it once was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header.[47]
References: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to, and the message-id of the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.
Reply-To: Address that should be used to reply to the message.
Sender: Address of the actual sender acting on behalf of the author listed in the From: field (secretary, list manager, etc.).
Archived-At: A direct link to the archived form of an individual email message.[48]
Note that the To: field is not necessarily related to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The actual delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may or may not originally have been extracted from the header content. The "To:" field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter which is delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. In the same way, the "From:" field does not have to be the real sender of the email message. Some mail servers apply email authentication systems to messages being relayed. Data pertaining to server's activity is also part of the header, as defined below.
SMTP defines the trace information of a message, which is also saved in the header using the following two fields:[49]
Received: when an SMTP server accepts a message it inserts this trace record at the top of the header (last to first).
Return-Path: when the delivery SMTP server makes the final delivery of a message, it inserts this field at the top of the header.
Other header fields that are added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace fields, in a broader sense.[50]
Authentication-Results: when a server carries out authentication checks, it can save the results in this field for consumption by downstream agents.[51]
Received-SPF: stores the results of SPF checks.[52]
Auto-Submitted: is used to mark automatically generated messages.[53]
VBR-Info: claims VBR whitelisting[54]
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| Message body | |
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007)
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| Content encoding | |
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Email was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII.[55] Much email software is 8-bit clean but must assume it will communicate with 7-bit servers and mail readers. The MIME standard introduced character set specifiers and two content transfer encodings to enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted printable for mostly 7 bit content with a few characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary binary data. The 8BITMIME and BINARY extensions were introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings, but many mail transport agents still do not support them fully. In some countries, several encoding schemes coexist; as the result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet language appears in non-readable form (the only exception is coincidence, when the sender and receiver use the same encoding scheme). Therefore, for international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.
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| Plain text and HTML | |
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Most modern graphic email clients allow the use of either plain text or HTML for the message body at the option of the user. HTML email messages often include an automatically generated plain text copy as well, for compatibility reasons.
Advantages of HTML include the ability to include in-line links and images, set apart previous messages in block quotes, wrap naturally on any display, use emphasis such as underlines and italics, and change font styles. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs, abuse of HTML email as a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malicious software.[56]
Some web based Mailing lists recommend that all posts be made in plain-text, with 72 or 80 characters per line[57][58] for all the above reasons, but also because they have a significant number of readers using text-based email clients such as Mutt.
Some Microsoft email clients allow rich formatting using RTF, but unless the recipient is guaranteed to have a compatible email client this should be avoided.[59]
In order to ensure that HTML sent in an email is rendered properly by the recipient's client software, an additional header must be specified when sending: "Content-type: text/html". Most email programs send this header automatically.
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| Servers and client applications | |
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The interface of an email client, Thunderbird.
Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, also sometimes called local delivery agents, LDAs). Users can retrieve their messages from servers using standard protocols such as POP or IMAP, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with a proprietary protocol specific to Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers. Webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an email client. Programs used by Tags: | |
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