What is an Electronic Mail (E-Mail)?

One of the most famous network services is electronic mail (e-mail). The simple standard mechanism for electronic mail on the internet. The first email systems simply consisted of file transfer protocols.

But some of the limitations of this system were as follows

• Sending a message to a group of people was inconvenient.
• Messages did not have many internet structures. So, its computer processing was complex.
• The sender never knew if the message arrived or not.
• It was not easy to hand over one's email to someone else.
• The user interface was poorly integrated.
• It was impossible to create and send messages containing a text, drawing, facsimile and voice together.

Email Architecture and Services

An e-mail system includes two subsystems as under:

• User agents
• Message transfer agents

User agents

They allow people to read message transfer agents.

They transfer the messages from the source to the destination.

Basic Functions

The E-mail system supports five basic systems, which are as follows:

Composition

The process of generating messages and answering them is called composition. The system can also support assistance with addressing and several header fields attached to each message.

Transfer

It is the process of moving messages from the sender to the recipient. This includes establishing a connection from the sender to a destination or some intermediate machine, outputting the message and releasing the connection.

Reporting

This is to tell the sender whether the message was delivered or rejected, or lost.

Displaying

It is the process of displaying incoming messages. For this purpose, simple conversation and formatting are required to be done.

Disposition

This is concerned with what the recipient does with the messages after receiving them. Some of the possibilities are as follows

• Throw after reading
• Throw before reading
• Save messages
• Forward messages
• Process messages in some other way

Advanced Features

Some of the advanced features of Email Systems included in addition to the essential functions are as follows

• It can be forwarding an email to a person away from his computer.
• It can create and destroy mailboxes to store incoming e-mail.
• It can inspect the contents of the mailbox, insert and delete messages from the mailboxes.
• It can send a message to a vast group of people using the mail list idea.
• It is used to provide a registered email.
• It is used for automatic notification of undelivered email.
• It is used to carbon copies.
• It is used to high priority email.
• It can make an alternative recipient.

Advantages of Email

There are various advantages of email, which are as follows:

• It is a cost-effective service to transmit with others as there are various email services available to individuals and organizations for complimentary of cost. Once a customer is online, it does not contain any additional charge for the services.
• Email supports a simple user interface and allows users to categorize and filter their messages. This can help us to identify unwanted emails such as junk and spam mail.
• Emails are beneficial for broadcasting products. As email is a form of transmission, organizations can involve many people and inform them quickly.
• Email exchanges can be saved for future retrieval, which allows users to keep essential conversations or confirmations in their data and can be searched and retrieved when needed quickly.
• Emails are beneficial for advertising products. An email is a form of transmission. Organizations or companies can interact with many people and inform them in a short time.