What is email?

EMAIL stands for electronic mail. It can take days to send a letter across the country and weeks to go around the world. To save time and money, more and more people are using electronic mail. It's fast, easy and much cheaper than the post office. So what is email? In its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from one computer to another. You can send or receive messages with attachments, such as pictures or formatted documents. You can even send computer programs.

Just as a letter makes stops at different postal stations along its way, e-mail passes from one computer, known as a mail server, to another as it travels over the Internet. Once it arrives at the destination mail server, it is stored in an electronic mailbox until the recipient retrieves it. With the Internet, this whole process can take seconds, allowing you to quickly communicate with people around the world at any time of the day or night.

To send and receive e-mail, you must have a connection to the Internet and an email address. This is similar to having an address where you can receive paper mail. An email address is a unique address which identifies you on the Internet. Addresses are in the form name@place (the @ symbol is pronounced "at").

The standard protocol used for sending e-mail on the Internet is called SMTP--Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It works in conjunction with POP servers. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, which is hosted on a computer, which acts as a server. When you send an e-mail message, your computer sends it to an SMTP server. The server looks at the e-mail address (like an address on the outside of an envelope), and forwards it to the recipient's mail server. When the message is received at the destination server, it is stored until the addressee retrieves it. You can send e-mail to anyone who has an e-mail address, anywhere in the world. Remember, almost all Internet service providers (ISPs) and all major online services offer an e-mail address with every account.