What is the full form of Email

Email: Electronic Mail

E-mail stands for Electronic mail. It is also known as email or e-mail and is a way for individuals to communicate with one another using electronic devices. At a time when "mail" solely referred to physical mail, email was therefore developed as the electronic (digital) equivalent of, or counterpart to, mail (hence the prefix e- + mail).

An email address is now frequently seen as a fundamental and essential component of many activities in business, trade, government, education, entertainment, and other areas of everyday life in most nations. An email later became a ubiquitous (extremely extensively used) communication channel. The communication channel is email, and each message sent over email is referred to as an email (mass/count distinction).

Email is accessible across both local area networks and computer networks, primarily the Internet. The store-and-forward approach is the foundation of present-day email systems. Email servers receive, deliver, forward, and store emails. Users and their computers do not need to be online at the same time in order to send or receive messages; instead, they simply need to establish a connection to a mail server or webmail interface.

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) have allowed Internet email, which was once an ASCII text-only communication tool, to transport attachments with multimedia content and text in various character sets. While international email is standardized and uses UTF-8 for internationalized email addresses, it is not yet commonly used.

History of E-mail

The email systems we use today are the result of a series of evolving technology and standards that have been part of email history.

Following the introduction of time-sharing in the early 1960s, sending computer-based messages between users of the same system became possible. In 1965, MIT's CTSS project made this practical. The early mail systems quickly evolved from informal communication techniques utilizing shared files. Early mainframe and minicomputer programmers primarily created mail applications that were comparable but typically incompatible. A complicated network of gateways and transit systems eventually connected many of them. Some systems also offered instant messaging in which both the sender and the recipient had to be online at the same time. The initial ARPANET network mail, which introduced the now-common address syntax with the '@' symbol representing the user's system address, was delivered in 1971. Conventions for transmitting mail messages through the File Transfer Protocol were honed across a number of RFCs. Other email networks started to emerge in the 1970s and later grew.

The 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s saw the emergence of proprietary electronic mail systems. Between 1970 and 1972, IBM created a basic internal office automation system. In 1974, it was updated with the OFS (Office System), which allowed for interpersonal mail movement. This system evolved into IBM Profs, which was made available to clients upon request before becoming on sale in 1981. In 1978, CompuServe introduced electronic mail for intraoffice notes. In the late 1970s, the Xerox Star development team started using electronic mail. The ALL-IN-1 system by DEC underwent development beginning in 1977, and it was released in 1982. In 1982, Hewlett-Packard released HPMAIL (later known as HP DeskManager), the world's most popular email system.

On the ARPANET, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocol was introduced in 1983. The mid-'80s saw the emergence of LAN email systems. A proprietary commercial system or the X.400 email system, a component of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), seemed likely to take precedence for a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, as the last prohibitions on using the Internet for business purposes were lifted in 1995, a number of circumstances led to the modern Internet suite of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email protocols as the standard.

Email usage spread throughout the business, governmental, academic, and defense/military sectors in the 1980s and 1990s. Email usage started to spread to the general public in the mid-1990s with the introduction of webmail (email for the web era) and email clients. In the 2000s, email was widely used. Instant access to emails is made possible by the rise in the use of smartphones since the 2010s.

Usage and Terminology

Since the 1960s, messages sent between computer users have been referred to as "mail." Network mail has been mentioned in RFCs pertaining to the ARPANET since 1973.

Electronic mail, historically, has referred to any transmission of electronic documents. For instance, the word was frequently used to describe the transmission of fax documents in the early 1970s. The first reference to electronic mail in the contemporary sense comes from 1975, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In the late 1970s, electronic mail was a hot topic, although it was typically abbreviated to mail. When interoffice mail gets electronic was a Business Week story from September 1976 that made the statement, "In a way, electronic mail is not new."

The OED lists "Postal Service presses ahead with E-mail" in the journal Electronics as the world's first recorded usage in June 1979. The term "email" hasn't been used before, but the initial instance may have been deleted. In April 1981, CompuServe changed the name of its electronic mail service to EMAIL, which helped to popularise the phrase. In the early 1980s, the phrase "computer mail" was also in use.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) initiative known as Electronic Computer Originated Mail, or E-COM, was mentioned in the use of E-mail in June 1979. USPS started researching electronic mail in 1977, which led to the creation of the E-COM proposal in September 1978. The 1982 service allowed business clients to transmit electronic mail to a post office location where it was printed.

Components of an Email:

User Agent (UA), Message Transfer Agent (MTA), Mail Box, and Spool file are the four fundamental parts of an email system. The explanations for these are provided below.

User Agent (UA): Software is often used to send and receive mail as the user agent (UA). It's also known as a "mail reader" at times. It takes a wide range of instructions for message creation, receipt, and answers, as well as for mailbox modification.

Message Transfer Agent (MTA): Mail transfer across systems is handled by the MTA (Message Transfer Agent). A system needs both a client MTA and a system MTA in order to send emails. If the recipients are connected to the same machine, it transfers messages to their mailboxes. If the destination mailbox is on a different computer, it sends mail to a peer MTA. For distribution between MTAs, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is employed.

Mailbox: A local hard disc file called a mailbox is used to store mail. This file includes delivered mail. The user has the option to read it or remove it as needed. Each user needs a mailbox in order to utilise the email system. It is only accessible to the mailbox's owner.

Spool file: The spool file is where emails that need to be sent are stored. Using SMTP, the user agent appends outgoing emails to this file. In order to distribute waiting mail, MTA retrieves it from the spool file. While using email, one name, or an alias, can stand in for many email accounts. The system checks the recipient's name against the database of aliases whenever a user needs to send a message. The term for this is a mailing list. There must be distinct messages created and provided to the MTA, one for each entry in the mailing list if one exists for the specified alias. The name alone acts as the naming address in the absence of a mailing list for the given alias, and a single message is delivered to the mail transfer entity.

E-mail system services offered:

Composition: The process by which messages and responses are created is referred to as composition. Any text editor can be used for composition.

Transfer: The sending of mail from sender to receiver is referred to as a transfer.

Reporting: Reporting is the phrase used to describe postal delivery confirmation. It enables users to see if their mail has been accepted, misplaced, or delivered.

Displaying: This phrase refers to putting messages in a user-friendly format.

Disposition: This stage asks the receiver what they will do with the message they have received, such as store it, delete it before reading, or delete it after reading.