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This article is about electronic mail. For the former manufacturing conglomerate, see Email Limited.
E-mail, short for electronic mail and often abbreviated to e-mail, email or simply mail, is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. The term "e-mail" (as a noun or verb) applies both to the Internet e-mail system based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and to X.400 systems, and to intranet systems allowing users within one organization to e-mail each other. Intranets may use the Internet protocols or X.400 protocols for internal e-mail service supporting workgroup collaboration. E-mail is often used to deliver bulk unsolicited messages, or "spam", but filter programs exist which can automatically delete some or most of these, depending on the situation.
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Spelling of this term is disputed. Many now regard the word "email" as a perfectly valid and formal word in its own right, and regard the abbreviation "e-mail" as anachronistic.Email (let\'s drop the hyphen). Retrieved on 2008-02-17. The word "email" is recognized as a valid English word in all major dictionaries[citation needed] however the e-mail abbreviation is often still used. Despite the word "email" being used in common English the computer industry and web sites still use multiple variants of the term.
Usage examples from prominent style guides:
Hyphens, En Dashes, Em Dashes - Q&A. Retrieved on 2007-11-08. e-mail. CMS is widely referenced as the standard for technical writing and journalism style guidelines in the United States. The Chicago Manual of Style. about.com. Retrieved on 2007-11-08.
Usage examples from prominent companies include:
The original RFC definitions for the SMTP standard,RFC 821 (rfc821) - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol the POP standard,RFC 1939 (rfc1939) - Post Office Protocol - Version 3 and the IMAP standard RFC 3501 (rfc3501) - INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4rev1 contain neither e-mail nor email, instead using the terms mail and message. Authors of later RFCs for SMTP use the term email (in addition to mail and message).RFC 2821 (rfc2821) - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol However, the latest RFC for POP uses mail and message.RFC 1939 (rfc1939) - Post Office Protocol - Version 3 Hyphens sometimes disappear from words originally coined with them after the term has come into widespread use, Prof. Donald E. Knuth. A note on email versus e-mail. Retrieved on 2007-11-08. although many of those words would still have the same pronunciation following normal English rules, such as web-site vs. website, non-zero vs. nonzero.[citation needed] In contrast, email (without a hyphen) following normal rules is not necessarily the same pronunciation as e-mail.[citation needed] Without the hyphen but keeping the same pronunciation, it would not follow pronunciation patterns of typical English words starting with em, such as emphasis or ember.[citation needed] Even the common English words that start with ema (dictionary search) have a short and/or soft e sound: emaciated, emanate, emasculate, emancipate,ema* - OneLook Dictionary Search rather than a separate syllable for a long-ebartleby.com Wave File. sound as in e-mail.e-mail. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000bartleby.com Wave File.
The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed hyphens from some 16,000 words that previously employed them Finlo Rohrer (September 20, 2007). Small object of grammatical desire. BBC News Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-11-08. although many of those were not merging the words, but removals that resulted in splitting original words into two words ("fig leaf", "hobby horse", "test tube", "ice cream").Simon Rabinovitch. "Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on", Reuters, 2007-09-21. Retrieved on 2008-01-23.
E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet. MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961.
"CTSS, Compatible Time-Sharing System" (September 4, 2006),
University of South Alabama, web:
USA-CTSS.
It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094
Tom Van Vleck, "The IBM 7094 and CTSS" (September 10, 2004), Multicians.org
(Multics), web: Multicians-7094.
from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC\'s Q32 and MIT\'s CTSS.
E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers by at least 1966 (it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before).
The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of e-mail. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation in 1969.The History of Electronic Mail Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the @ sign to separate the names of the user and their machine in 1971.The First Email The ARPANET significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the killer app of the ARPANET.
The diagram above shows a typical sequence of events that takes place when Alice composes a message using her mail user agent (MUA). She types in, or selects from an address book, the e-mail address of her correspondent. She hits the "send" button.
This sequence of events applies to the majority of e-mail users. However, there are many alternative possibilities and complications to the e-mail system:
It used to be the case that many MTAs would accept messages for any recipient on the Internet and do their best to deliver them. Such MTAs are called open mail relays. This was 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 that was closer to the destination. The relay would have a better chance of delivering the message at a later time. However, this mechanism proved to be exploitable by people sending unsolicited bulk e-mail and as a consequence very few modern MTAs are open mail relays, and many MTAs will not accept messages from open mail relays because such messages are very likely to be spam.
Note that the people, e-mail addresses and domain names in this explanation are fictional: see Alice and Bob.
The format of Internet e-mail messages is defined in RFC 2822 and a series of RFCs, RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Although as of July 13 2005 RFC 2822 is technically a proposed IETF standard and the MIME RFCs are draft IETF standards,RFC INDEX. these documents are the de facto standards for the format of Internet e-mail. Prior to the introduction of RFC 2822 in 2001 the format described by RFC 822 was the de facto standard for Internet e-mail for nearly two decades; it is still the official IETF standard. The IETF reserved the numbers 2821 and 2822 for the updated versions of RFC 821 (SMTP) and RFC 822, honoring the extreme importance of these two RFCs. RFC 822 was published in 1982 and based on the earlier RFC 733.
Internet e-mail messages consist of two major sections:
The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
The message header consists of fields, usually including at least the following:
Each header field has a name and a value. RFC 2822 specifies the precise syntax. Informally, the field name starts in the first character of a line, followed by a ":", followed by the value which is continued on non-null subsequent lines that 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.
Note that the "To" field in the header is not necessarily related to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The actual delivery list is supplied in the SMTP protocol, not extracted from the header content. The "To" field is similar to the greeting at the top of a conventional letter which is delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. Also note that the "From" field does not have to be the real sender of the e-mail message. It is very easy to fake the "From" field and let a message seem to be from any mail address. It is possible to digitally sign e-mail, which is much harder to fake. Some Internet service providers do not relay e-mail claiming to come from a domain not hosted by them, but very few (if any) check to make sure that the person or even e-mail address named in the "From" field is the one associated with the connection. Some Internet service providers apply e-mail authentication systems to e-mail being sent through their MTA to allow other MTAs to detect forged spam that might apparently appear to be from them.
Other common header fields include (see RFC 4021 or RFC 2076 for more):
Many e-mail clients present "Bcc" (Blind carbon copy, recipients not visible in the "To" field) as a header field. Different protocols are used to deal with the "Bcc" field; at times the entire field is removed, whereas other times the field remains but the addresses therein are removed. Addresses added as "Bcc" are only added to the SMTP delivery list, and do not get included in the message data.
IANA maintains a list of standard header fields.
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) |
E-mail was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII. Much e-mail software is 8-bit clean but must assume it will be communicating 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 extension was introduced to allow transmission of mail without the need for these encodings but many mail transport agents still don\'t support it fully. For international character sets, Unicode is growing in popularity.
Both plain text and HTML are used to convey e-mail. While text is certain to be read by all users without problems, there is a perception that HTML-based e-mail has a higher aesthetic value. Advantages of HTML include the ability to include inline 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. HTML e-mail messages often include an automatically-generated plain text copy as well, for compatibility reasons. Disadvantages include the increased size of the email, privacy concerns about web bugs and that HTML email can be a vector for phishing attacks and the spread of malicious software.Email policies that prevent viruses.
Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transport agents. Users can download their messages from servers with standard protocols such as the POP or IMAP protocols, or, as is more likely in a large corporate environment, with a proprietary protocol specific to Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Servers.
Mail can be stored either on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox. Several prominent e-mail clients use their own proprietary format and require conversion software to transfer e-mail between them.
When a message cannot be delivered, the recipient MTA must send a bounce message back to the sender, indicating the problem.
Most, but not all, e-mail clients save individual messages as separate files, or allow users to do so. Different applications save e-mail files with different filename extensions.
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) |
Many observers bemoan the rise of flaming in written communications. Flaming occurs when one person sends an angry and/or antagonistic message. Flaming is assumed to be more common today because of the ease and impersonality of e-mail communications: confrontations in person or via telephone require direct interaction, where social norms encourage civility, whereas typing a message to another person is an indirect interaction, so civility may be forgotten.
Is when you ignore a large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and answering them. Sometimes it involves sending a boilerplate message explaining that the email inbox is being cleared out. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is credited with coining this term, but he may only have popularized it."All We Are Saying.", New York Times, December 23, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-24.
E-mail was widely accepted by the business community as the first broad electronic communication medium and was the first ‘e-revolution’ in Business communication. E-mail is very simple to understand and like postal mail, e-mail solves two basic problems of communication. LAN based email is also an emerging form of usage for business. It not only allows the business user to download mail when offline, it also provides the small business user to have multiple users email ID\'s with just one email connection.
Much of the business world relies on communication between individuals who are physically distant from one another; organizing and participating in an in-person meeting can be time-consuming and expensive. E-mail provides a near-instantaneous exchange of information at little cost. Teleconferencing bridges physical distance, but the logistics of gathering people together at the same time remains.
For real time communication, participants generally have to be working on the same schedule. They need to be at the same place at the same time and spend the same amount of time on the same information.
E-mail allows each participant to decide when and how they will process the information.
Most business professionals today spend between 20% and 50% of their working time using e-mail:Email Right to Privacy - Why Small Businesses Care. Anita Campbell (2007-06-19). reading, ordering, sorting, ‘re-contextualizing’ fragmented information and of course writing e-mail. Use of e-mail is increasing, due to trends of globalization—distribution of organizational divisions, outsourcing, among others. E-mail can lead to some well-known problems:
Despite these disadvantages, and despite the availability of other tools, e-mail-based communication is still the most widely used written medium in businesses.
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This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) |
The usefulness of e-mail is being threatened by four phenomena: e-mail bombardment, spamming, phishing and e-mail worms.
Spamming is unsolicited commercial e-mail. Because of the very low cost of sending e-mail, spammers can send hundreds of millions of e-mail messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive voluminous unsolicted email each day.
E-mail worms use e-mail as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first e-mail worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the more popular Microsoft Windows operating system.
The combination of spam and worm programs results in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk e-mail, which reduces the usefulness of e-mail as a practical tool.
A number of anti-spam techniques mitigate the impact of spam. In the United States, U.S. Congress has also passed a law, the Can Spam Act of 2003, attempting to regulate such e-mail. Australia also has very strict spam laws restricting the sending of spam from an Australian ISP,Spam Bill 2003. but its impact has been minimal since most spam comes from regimes that seem reluctant to regulate the sending of spam.
E-mail privacy, without some security precautions, can be compromised because:
There are cryptography applications that can serve as a remedy to one or more of the above. For example, Virtual Private Networks or the Tor anonymity network can be used to encrypt traffic from the user machine to a safer network while GPG, PGP or S/MIME can be used for end-to-end message encryption, and SMTP STARTTLS or SMTP over Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer can be used to encrypt communications for a single mail hop between the SMTP client and the SMTP server.
Additionally, many mail user agents do not protect logins and passwords, making them easy to intercept by an attacker. Encrypted authentication schemes such as SASL prevent this.
Finally, attached files share many of the same hazards as those found in peer-to-peer filesharing. Attached files may contain trojans or viruses.
E-mail traditionally provides no mechanism for tracking a sent message. The system(s) involved will generally make an effort to either deliver mail or return a failure notice ("bounce message"), but there is no guarantee that a message will actually be delivered, let alone read by the recipient. This is in contrast to the postal mail system, which offers registered mail or other forms of tracking and tracing.
To remedy this, the IETF introduced Delivery Status Notifications (delivery receipts) and Message Disposition Notifications (return receipts).
The US Government has been involved in e-mail in several different ways.
Starting in 1977, the US Postal Service (USPS) recognized the electronic mail and electronic transactions posed a significant threat to First Class mail volumes and revenue. Therefore, the USPS initiated an experimental e-mail service known as E-COM. Electronic messages would be transmitted to a post office, printed out, and delivered in hard copy form. In order to take advantage of the service, an individual had to transmit at least 200 messages. The delivery time of the messages was the same as First Class mail and cost 26 cents. The service was said to be subsidized and apparently USPS lost substantial money on the experiment. Both the US Postal Commission and the Federal Communications Commission opposed E-COM. The FCC concluded that E-COM constituted common carriage under its jurisdiction and the USPS would have to file a tariff.In re Request for declaratory ruling and investigation by Graphnet Systems, Inc., concerning the proposed E-COM service, FCC Docket No. 79-6 (Sept 4, 1979) Three years after initiating the service, USPS canceled E-COM and attempted to sell it off.History of the United States Postal Service, USPSHardy, Ian R; The Evolution of ARPANET Email; 1996-05-13; History Thesis; University of California at BerkeleyJames Bovard, The Law Dinosaur: The US Postal Service, CATO Policy Analysis (Feb. 1985) Jay Akkad, The History of EmailCybertelecom :: EmailUS Postal Service: Postal Activities and Laws Related to Electronic Commerce, GAO-00-188 Implications of Electronic Mail and Message Systems for the U.S. Postal Service , Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States, August 1982
Early on in the history of the ARPANet, there were multiple e-mail clients which had various, and at times, incompatible formats. For example, in the system Multics, the "@" sign meant "kill line" and anything after the "@" sign would be ignored.Jay Akkad, The History of Email The Department of Defense DARPA desired to have uniformity and interoperability for e-mail and therefore funded efforts to drive towards unified interoperable standards. This led to David Crocker, John Vittal, Kenneth Pogran, and Austin Henderson publishing RFC 733, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Message" (Nov. 21, 1977), which was apparently not effective. In 1979, a meeting was held at BBN to resolve incompatibility issues. Jon Postel recounted the meeting in RFC 808, "Summary of Computer Mail Services Meeting Held at BBN on 10 January 1979" (March 1, 1982), which includes an appendix listing the varying e-mail systems at the time. This, in turn, lead to the release of David Crocker\'s RFC 822, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages" (Aug. 13, 1982).Email History, How Email was Invented , Living Internet
The National Science Foundation took over operations of the ARPANet and Internet from the Department of Defense, and initiated NSFNet, a new backbone for the network. A part of the NSFNet AUP was that no commercial traffic would be permitted.Cybertelecom :: Internet History In 1988, Vint Cerf arranged for an interconnection of MCI Mail with NSFNET on an experimental basis. The following year Compuserve e-mail interconnected with NSFNET. Within a few years the commercial traffic restriction was removed from NSFNETs AUP, and NSFNET was privitized.
In the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission grew concerned with fraud transpiring in e-mail, and initiated a series of procedures on SPAM, fraud, and phishing.Cybertelecom :: SPAM Reference In 2004, FTC jurisdiction over SPAM was codified into law in the form of the CAN SPAM Act.Cybertelecom :: Can Spam Act Several other US Federal Agencies have also exercised jurisdiction including the Department of Justice and the Secret Service.
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