9 - Internet Mail

Abstract

Internet mail, also referred to as electronic mail, e-mail, email, or just mail (as opposed to old-fashioned postal mail, postal service, or snail mail) permits individuals sharing nothing more than access to the internet to interact across virtually any boundary. Although the architecture devised for internet mail, with its user, message transfer, and message injection agents, may seem unwieldy to us today, it still serves us remarkably reliably and at low cost. The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) protocols and formats have survived substantially unchanged since 1981, and could conceivably continue to function far into the future with the use of SMTP extensions. The POP (Post Office Protocol) makes SMTP more accessible to users of laptop or desktop PCs, while the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) increasingly enables users to access their mail from any location, any PC. Message privacy is still a problem that most users are either unaware of or unconcerned about, but S/MIME provides one approach to the problem. Like other application protocols, SMTP uses a simple protocol for exchanging textual command and response information: Telnet.