E-mail: how it works and what hidden hazards

Electronic mail or e-mail (short for electronic mail) is one of the oldest Internet applications.

E-mail can be viewed as the technological evolution of the postal service for sending and receiving letters. The main benefit of using e-mail, the postal system than paper, is the rapidity with which the message is delivered to the recipient and the cost, very close to zero, to send any message.

These two caratteritiche have made ​​that e-mail is claimed more and more dominant as a tool for exchanging information and documents of all kinds (which may be incorporated into the body of the message or added as an attachment) to reach volumes enormous traffic.

After we get this necessary premise, finally, in the midst of the speech. We see, then, what are the "ingredients" necessary for the essential function of this powerful tool:

• User Agent: It 'program or web application that users use for creating, editing, reading and sending an e-mail. Among the desktop applications that perform this function we can mention Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird on Windows and Mac in a Mail User Agent, fall under the categories including web applications (the so-called web mail), for example, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail.
• Mail Server: Each user has an email account is the owner of a mailbox that, physically, is nothing but a "piece" of space on a mail server.
  Mail servers perform, in fact, two different functions: collect the inbox and involved in the delivery of messages. In the event that, for a generic problem, a mail server is unable to forward an e-mail to the destination mail server, put the message in the queue trying to log in again to forward predetermined intervals. After a certain number of failed attempts, the mail server will notify the user that the message has not been sent.
• Protocols: These are necessary for the proper sending and reading e-mail correct. The type of required protocols, so that the e-mail service to work, are different: a protocol for sending (SMTP) and a protocol for reading (to read the messages you can choose between two different protocols: POP3 and IMAP ).

By e-mail, as in the traditional postal service, it establishes a kind of asynchronous communication that can be defined as when you sent the message does not require the sender and receiver are connected simultaneously: the e-mail will be delivered to the target server and the target user, when it deems placed at suitable, perform authentication for reading the received message.

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