Electronic mail, often abbreviated as email, e.mail or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages. E-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in a networking context, verifies the integrity of the message before forwarding it. In general, this model in which e-mail computer server systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the e-mail infrastructure, typically an e-mail server, with a network-enabled device (e.g., a personal computer) for the duration of message submission or retrieval. Originally, e-mail was always transmitted directly from one user's device to another's; nowadays this is rarely the case.
An electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field.
Originally a text-only communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, which were standardized in with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME's use, however, has grown beyond describing the content of e-mail to describing content type in general, including for the web (MIME).
The foundation for today's global Internet e-mail service was created in the early ARPANET The ARPANET created by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War, was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet and standards for encoding of messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). An e-mail sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from the ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current service.
Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. Applications were originally interactive command-line tools with a (FTP), but is today carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP was first defined in RFC 821 (STD 15), and last updated by RFC 5321 (2008) which includes the extended SMTP (ESMTP) additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today. SMTP is specified for outgoing mail (SMTP), first published as Internet standard In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separately from the message (headers and body) itself.
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