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How Email Works
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Have you ever wondered how email gets from your desktop to a friend halfway around the world? What is a POP3 server, and how does it hold your mail? The answers may surprise you, because it turns out that email is an incredibly simple system at its core! In this edition of How Stuff Works we'll take an in-depth look at email and how it works!
What is an Email Message?
An email message has always been nothing more than a simple text message -- a piece of text sent to a recipient. When you send an email message to a friend, you are sending a piece of text. In the beginning and even today, email messages tend to be short pieces of text, although the ability to add attachments now makes many email messages quite long. Even with attachments, however, email messages continue to be text messages -- we'll see why when we get to attachments.
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by Marshall Brain
Every day the citizens of the Internet send each other billions of email messages. If you are online a lot, you yourself may send a dozen or two emails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously email has become an extremely popular communication tool in a very short time!
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According to this (extremely interesting) article, the first email message was sent in 1971 by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. Prior to this, you could only send messages to users on a single machine. Tomlinson's breakthrough was the the ability to send messages to other machines on the Internet, using the @ sign to designate the receiving machine.
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