This week we will talk about email and how it works.
At my job I had a snafu with email a couple of weeks ago, this made me think about emails and how they work. So I researched it and thought I'd share my findings with you and give you a glimpse behind the curtain of what happens after you send an email out. As we discover about email, we will use my email as an example to help understand it better.
So what is an email? Well email literally means electronic email, email is also a very old technology that is still used today. At one point email was the equivalent of a text message today, now we use it for many reasons that I couldn't even list all of them here. It may seem as simple as type out the sender, subject, and body. Click send and off it goes straight to the sender, but there is a little more to it than that. Let me explain, so after you do your part of putting in the sender, subject, and body of the email. You click send, the magic happens. First stop is the SMTP server. SMTP stands for simple mail transfer protocol(the internet is made up of many protocols that dictate how things work and what purpose those things have, but that is a discussion for another day). The SMTP server is like the post office, it will check your message to find out where it needs to go. Unfortunately, this post office doesn't have a list of domains (address's, basically what is after the @ symbol). So the SMTP server sends a message to the DNS (Domain Name System) server asking what the IP (Internet protocol) address is for, let's say hotmail.com. If the DNS server knows the IP address it will send it back to the SMTP server, if not it has to go out to the internet to discover what the IP address for hotmail.com is. Once it gets the IP address, it will also check out to see if that IP address has an MX (mail exchange) server, which means that that IP address is able to receive emails. So now that the DNS server has all this info, it will go back to the SMTP server with it and hand over that information. The SMTP server will then use that info to send the email over to the hotmail.com.com or 204.79.197.212 which is the IP address. Once there it is redirected to the MX server, the MX server then directs it to the user's account. The user's account will then use either IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or POP (Post Office Protocol) in its retrieval of emails. By user account, I mean what you use to access your email, whether it is Thunderbird or through the browser. Then your user account will inform you that “You've Got Mail”. Then you can read and access that email, simple, right?
I hope this has helped you to understand what goes into sending an email, and had you gain a better knowledge of how these boxes we work with daily actually work. If you have any topics you're interested in, let me know, maybe I do a DR note in the future on it. Until next week, have a great day.
https://www.howtogeek.com/56002/htg-explains-how-does-email-work/
