An Introduction To Email Servers

An Introduction to Email Servers

To send an e-mail, you must connect to the Internet and an e-mail application such as Microsoft Outlook Express or Eudora. The e-mail application connects to your mail server that can forward your e-mail to one or more recipients. The same server receives e-mails from your senders.

When you send an e-mail, your computer transmits it to a SMTP server using the Internet. The server looks at the e-mail (as the address on an envelope), then forward on this matter to the recipient's mail server using a program called Send-mail. If for any reason, the recipient of the e-mail server is unreachable, Send-mail periodically re-tries to send the e-mail until it gets through or otherwise fails. If after several attempts the e-mail could not be delivered, you will receive a notification informing you of the problem. If an e-mail cannot be delivered, even after five days, the mail server sends you a notification of failure instead of an alert, highlighting the error.

When the e-mail is received at the destination mail server, it is stored until retrieved by the addressee. To retrieve your emails, your email client (such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express) connects to POP3 or IMAP issues and a series of commands to download copies of your e-mail to your computer.

E-mails can be sent anywhere in the world to anyone with an e-mail address. Almost all providers of Internet services (ISPs) offer e-mail to each account.

Initially, when the e-mail technology was introduced, only short messages could be sent. Attachments such as formatted documents, photographs etc could not be sent. With the introduction of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) and other encoding techniques, it became possible to send any type of attachments with an e-mail message.

Among the most common Email Server features, these are worth mentioning:
- Servers POP3, IMAP
- POP and IMAP servers (secure)
- Email accounts and unlimited aliases
- Server authenticated SMTP
- Auto-responders user-selectable
- Mailing lists (mailman)
- Clients included webmail
- Management of user rights
- Configurable Anti-spam
- Antivirus with Quarantine
-Advanced management of users