Email

Electronic mail, most commonly called email or e-mail since around 1993, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Email operates across the Internet or other computer networks.

Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to a mail server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Historically, the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to describe fax document transmission. As a result, it is difficult to find the first citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today.

An Internet email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp.

Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multi-media content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but not yet widely adopted.

Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it,[5] but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email message sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today.

Email is an information and communications technology. It uses technology to communicate a digital message over the Internet. Users use email differently, based on how they think about it. There are many software platforms available to send and receive. Popular email platforms include Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and many others.

Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.

(Source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email)