1. A Quick Look At How Email Works Understanding the basics of how email works can make life a lot easier for any email user. Especially those who are interested in using email effectively.

3. Jargon Buster SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol DNS – Domain Name Server Router – which is a switch Email client – is a piece of software that runs o your computer that handles email, ie OUTLOOK POP3 – Post Office Protocol simply acts as an interface between the e-mail client and the text file containing your messages. IMAP server - Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a protocol for e-mail retrieval and storage

4. The Email Client Email is composed and read in an email client. This is the part of the process you will be most familiar with. If you want to read mail you click “Check Mail”, “New Mail” or something similar and new messages show up in your “Inbox”. To send mail you click “Compose” or “Write” and the client gives you a compose window where you write your message. When you’re done you click “Send” and the message gets sent. The “Client” part of the term email client refers to the fact that this software requires the help of a Server to do its job. The client takes care of making the mail useful to you but the servers are the ones that actually move the mail around. Think of the client as your desk (or wherever you store and compose paper based mail) and the servers as the postal service.

5. What do the servers do? After the SMTP server accepts the message from your client it works its way through all of the recipients (everyone with a “To:” or a “Cc:” or a “Bcc:”) and tries to deliver the message to each one. This is where the Domain Naming System (DNS) and specifically Mail Exchanger (MX) Records come in. The sending SMTP server has to consult the DNS MX records for each recipient’s domain to find out where to send the message. This is similar to your local post office sorting your letters for delivery to your local post office. Hopefully after locating and attempting to deliver to the mail servers for all of the domains in the recipient list the sending server’s job will be over. But, if it is unable to deliver to any of the recipients you will get a message from it (usually as “mailer-daemon”) letting you know it couldn’t deliver for one or more recipients.

6. When you click “Get Messages” or “Check Mail” or whatever your client labels this operation, the client connects to the mailbox and downloads your messages. This is usually accomplished using Post Office Protocol (POP or POP3). It can also be done using Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) but this is less common. As with the SMTP connection used for sending, the email client knows how to find the POP, POP3 or IMAP server because you (or whoever set up your client) gave it this information when the address was configured. By default, most email clients will download new messages to your computer and delete them from the server. (If you want to, you can configure your client to leave messages on the server so that other clients, possibly a home computer or a Blackberry, can have a chance to retrieve them.) Once the messages are downloaded they show up as “new” or “unread” messages in your “Inbox” and you can interact with them (i.e. Read, Reply, Forward, Delete, etc.).