Online Smart Trainer

E-mail System

Ø  E-mail system comprises of the following three components:

·      Mailer

·      Mail Server

·      Mailbox

Mailer:

Ø  It is also called mail program, mail application or mail client. It allows us to manage, read and compose e-mail.

Mail Server:

Ø  The function of mail server is to receive, store and deliver the email. It is must for mail servers to be running all the time because if it crashes or is down, email can be lost.

Mailboxes:

Ø  Mailbox is generally a folder that contains emails and information about them

Working of E-mail

Ø  Email working follows the client server approach. In this client is the mailer i.e. the mail application or mail program and server is a device that manages emails.

Ø  Following example will take you through the basic steps involved in sending and receiving emails and will give you a better understanding of working of email system:

·      Suppose person A wants to send an email message to person B.

·      Person A composes the messages using a mailer program i.e. mail client and then select Send option.

·      The message is routed to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to person B’s mail server.

·      The mail server stores the email message on disk in an area designated for person B.

            The disk space area on mail server is called mail spool.

·      Now, suppose person B is running a POP client and knows how to communicate with B’s mail server.

·      It will periodically poll the POP server to check if any new email has arrived for B.As in this case, person A has sent an email for person B, so email is forwarded over the network to B’s PC. This is message is now stored on person B’s PC.

Ø  The following diagram gives pictorial representation of the steps discussed above:

E-mail Operations:

 

1)      Creating Email Account:

Ø  There are various email service provider available such as Gmail, hotmail, ymail, rediff mail etc.

Ø  Here we will learn how to create an account using Gmail.

·     Open gmail.com and click create an account.

·     Now a form will appear. Fill your details here and click Next Step.

2)      Composing and Sending Email

Ø  Before sending an email, we need to compose a message. When we are composing an email message, we specify the following things:

·     Sender’s address in To field

·     Cc (if required)

·     Bcc (if required)

·     Subject of email message

·     Text

·     Signature

Ø  You should specify the correct email address; otherwise it will send an error back to the sender.

Ø  Once you have specified all the above parameters, It’s time to send the email. The mailer program provides a Send button to send email, when you click Send, it is sent to the mail server and a message mail sent successfully is shown at the above.

3)      Reading Email

Ø  Every email program offers you an interface to access email messages. Like in Gmail, emails are stored under different tabs such as primary, social, and promotion. When you click one of tab, it displays a list of emails under that tab.

Ø  In order to read an email, you just have to click on that email. Once you click a particular email, it gets opened.

Ø  The opened email may have some file attached with it. The attachments are shown at the bottom of the opened email with an option called download attachment.

4)      Replying Email

Ø  After reading an email, you may have to reply that email.

Ø   To reply an email, click Reply option shown at the bottom of the opened email.

Ø  Once you click on Reply, it will automatically copy the sender’s address in to the To field. Below the To field, there is a text box where you can type the message.

Ø  Once you are done with entering message, click Send button. It’s that easy. Your email is sent.

5)    Forwarding Email

Ø  It is also possible to send a copy of the message that you have received along with your own comments if you want. This can be done using forward button available in mail client software.

Ø  The difference between replying and forwarding an email is that when you reply a message to a person who has send the mail but while forwarding you can send it to anyone.

Ø  When you receive a forwarded message; Subject: field is prefixed with Fwd.

6)    Deleting Email

Ø  If you don’t want to keep email into your inbox, you can delete it by simply selecting the message from the message list and clicking delete or pressing the appropriate command.

Ø  Some mail clients offers the deleted mails to be stored in a folder called deleted items or trash from where you can recover a deleted email.

E-mail Features:

Ø  Now a day, the mail client comes with enhanced features such as attachment, address book, and MIME support.

a)       Attachment

Ø  Ability to attach file(s) along with the message is one of the most useful features of email. The attachment may be a word document, PowerPoint presentation, audio/video files, or images.

·          In order to attach file(s) to an email, click the attach button. As a result, a dialog box appears asking for specifying the name and location of the file you want to attach.

·          Once you have selected the appropriate file, it is attached to the mail.

·          Usually a paper clip icon appears in the email which indicates that it has an attachment.

·          When adding an attachment it is better to compress the attached files so as to reduce the file size and save transmission time as sending and downloading large files consumes a lot of space and time.

b)       Address Book

Ø  Address book feature of a mail program allows the users to store information about the people whom they communicate regularly by sending emails. Here are some of the key features of an Address book:

·     Address book includes the nick names, email addresses, phone number etc. of the people.

·     Using address book allows us not to memorize email of address of a person, you just have to select recipient name from the list.

·     When you select a particular name from the list, the corresponding email address link automatically get inserted in to the To: field.

·     Address book also allows creating a group so that you can send an email to every member of the group at once instead of giving each person email address one by one.

c)        MIME Types

Ø  MIME is acronym of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME compliant mailer allows us to send files other than simple text i.e. It allows us to send audio, video, images, document, and PDF files as an attachment to an email.

Ø Suppose if you want to send a word document that has a group of tabular columns with complex formatting. If we transfer the file as text, all the formatting may be lost. MIME compliant mailer takes care of messy details and the message arrives as desired.
Ø  It can send messages only in Network Virtual Terminal (NVT) 7-bit ASCII format. In other words, it has some limitations.
Ø For example, it cannot be used for languages that are not supported by 7-bit ASCII characters (such as French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese).
Ø Also, it cannot be used to send binary files or video or audio data.

Ø Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is a supplementary protocol that allows non-ASCII data to be sent through e-mail.

Ø  MIME transforms non-ASCII data at the sender site to NVT ASCII data and delivers them to the client MTA to be sent through the Internet.
Ø  The message at the receiving side is transformed back to the original data.

E-mail Providers:

Ø  There are several email service providers available in the market with their enabled features such as sending, receiving, drafting, storing an email and much more.

Ø  The following table shows the popular email service providers:

S.N.	Service and Description
1.	Gmail Gmail is an email service that allows users to collect all the messages. It also offers approx 15 GB of free storage.
2.	Hotmail Hotmail offers free email and practically unlimited storage accessible on web.
3.	Yahoo Mail Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage, SMS texting, social networking and instant messaging to boot.
4.	iCloud Mail iCloud Mail offers ample storage, IMAP access, and an elegantly functional web application.
5.	ATM Mail ATM Mail is a free email service with good spam protection.
6.	Mail.com and GMX Mail Mail.com and GMX Mail offers reliable mail service with unlimited online storage.
7.	Shortmail Shortmail offers easy and fast email service but with limited 500 characters per message.
8.	Inbox.com Inbox.com offers 5 GB of free online storage. IMAP is not supported by Inbox.com
9.	Facebook Messages Facebook Messages includes the message conversation.
10.	My Way Mail My Way Mail offers clean and fast free email service but lacks in secure messaging.