E-mail - Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Notes

Basic of Email

• Electronic mail is a method of exchanging messages between people using electronic devices. Invented by Ray Tomlinson, email first entered limited use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email.
• Email, short for Electronic Mail, consists of messages which are sent and received using the Internet. There are many different email services available that allow you to create an email account and send and receive email and attachments, many of which are free.
• Today, the top three webmail providers are Yahoo!, Microsoft’s Outlook.com (previously Hotmail), and Google’s Gmail.
• Many people also have an email address hosted by their company, school, or organization. These email addresses are usually for professional purposes.
• The first five lines of an E-mail message is called E-mail header. The header part comprises of following fields:
  • From
  • Date
  • To
  • Subject
  • CC
  • BCC

Email Protocols: IMAP, POP3, SMTP and HTTP
E-mail Protocols are set of rules that help the client to properly transmit the information to or from the mail server.

• POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3): This is a simple, standardized protocol that allows users to access their mailboxes on the Internet and download messages to their computers. The simple design of POP3 allows casual email users who have a temporary Internet connection (dial-up access) to access emails. They can read their emails, draft new emails or reply to emails while they are offline, and can send these emails when they are back online.
• IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol): This is a standard protocol used for email transfer by users. Like POP3, it also supports both online and offline modes of email access. The email message is downloaded to the user’s machine only when a specific request is made to read it. Users can download mails to their computers while keeping a copy on the server. The mails on the server are the primary copy and anything changed on the local machine is updated by what is on the serve
• SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): As the name suggests, SMTP is a simple, text-based protocol that works best when devices are interconnected to each other. However, SMTP protocol can only be used to send emails. Unlike POP3 and IMAP protocols, SMTP does not provide the functionality to the users to retrieve emails from the server. This limits the use of SMTP to some extent. One of the main issues with SMTP is the lack of sender email authentication. SMTP lacks security features too and thus users get spam emails.

What’s the Difference Between CC and BCC When Sending an Email?

• Bcc Stands for “Blind Carbon Copy.” When you send an e-mail to only one person, you type the recipient’s address in the “To:” field. When you send a message to more than one person, you have the option to enter addresses in the “Cc:” and “Bcc:” fields. “Cc” stands for “Carbon Copy,” while “Bcc” stands for “Blind Carbon Copy.”
• A Carbon Copy, or “Cc’d” message is an e-mail that is copied to one or more recipients. Both the main recipient (whose address is in the “To:” field) and the Cc’d recipients can see all the addresses the message was sent to. When a message is blind carbon copied, neither the main recipient nor the Bcc’d recipients can see the addresses in the “Bcc:” field.
• Blind carbon copying is a useful way to let others see an e-mail you sent without the main recipient knowing. It is faster than sending the original message and then forwarding the sent message to the other recipients. It is also good etiquette to use Bcc when copying a message to many people. This prevents the e-mail addresses from being captured by someone in the list who might use them for spamming purposes. However, if it is important that each recipient knows who your message was sent to, use carbon copy (Cc) instead.