You’ve probably already sent and received an email. On average, the French receive 33 emails per day , for a total of 1.4 billion emails sent. But while this digital mode of communication has become part of our daily lives, we rarely pay attention to how it works and the different elements that make it up.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at email. How does it allow us to transmit messages more quickly and, in the vast majority of cases, for free? We’ll present its various uses and the advantages and disadvantages it presents.
What is an email?
Electronic mail is a message sent and australia phone number library received over the internet and stored on an electronic device (computer, tablet, smartphone). It is a fast, inexpensive, and accessible way for everyone to communicate, for both professional and personal purposes. In theory, you can send and receive emails from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.
The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson
Predating the ARPANET and the Internet. It was one of the earliest online activities, and exchanging emails remains the most popular use of the Internet.
Today, email can be exchanged over not all data should be processed computer networks, primarily the Internet, but also between public and private networks, such as a local Internet network. It can also have a single recipient or be distributed to mailing lists managed using an email reflector (as in the case of a newsletter , for example).
Different protocols are used to enable email exchanges. For example, we can mention:
- The Simple Mail Transfer south africa numbers Protocol (SMTP) for sending email;
- Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) for receiving emails,
- But also the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), which can be used to receive emails from any device and anywhere.
Email messages are typically encoded in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) format. However, users can also send non-text files, such as images and audio files, as attachments.
