The Journey of an Email
First, let’s talk little about Email. Electronic mail or simply an email is an electronic message which users can send and receive via internet, one can send text, emojis, attachments of various documents even half way across the world in one simple click. And even with the increasing popularity of texting and other electronic message system, email still reigns supreme. We send ten times more emails than texts which adds up to about two million emails per second (not to mention that nearly half of these are SPAMS).
With the advancement in technology, our communication has also improved, every message is one click away. But let’s take a deep breath and understand briefly how actually an email is sent from your computer to the receiver’s computer; clearly it’s not just that ‘Send’ option that works. When you hit the ‘Send’ button, in simple words, the message goes from one post office to another until it reaches the receiver that you have mentioned.
Deciding the Right Path for the Email
Let’s take an example, suppose you have to send an email to gif@numeric.com, this is your friend’s email address. Then time you click on the button, a chain of process gets initiated. First your email client needs to get the SMTP email server‘s attention by sending an EHLO command in order to identify itself and let the server know that there is an email that needs to be transferred. Then the SMTP mail server or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Server, which also has two parts: the user agent and local MTA, brings it to the client’s MTA which stands for Mail Transfer Agent but it is impractical for MTA alone to know where to send the mail in the enormous web. So, what MTA does is that it takes the help of DNS which stands for Domain Name System, which acts like a phone book, to find out where exactly to send the email. The DNS identifies the IP address that is attached to the particular domain then the MTA uses DNS to map out a path and sends the email to a different MTA that is closer to your friend’s inbox. This whole process repeats itself until the email gets to the MTA that belongs to the receiver’s email client.
The part of the email address @numeric.com is the domain that holds thousands of designated mailboxes like the one ‘gif’.
Retrieval Of the Email
Once the email reaches the final MTA it transfers the mail to one particular mailbox that is, in this case, gif. The one of the two protocols POP or IMAP is used for the retrieval of the message from the client server to the receiver’s computer. There is one more process involved, spam filters, which removes the mail, if the address is blacklisted, even before it reaches your inbox, or else it goes directly to your spam folder. If sometimes an email doesn’t make any sense, then consider that someone is experimenting to go past the spam filters. The mail won’t contain any link or attachments, just a drill before an attack.
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is also known as RFC 821 and RFC 2821. It is created and maintained by IETF or commonly known as Internet Engineering Task Force. The SMTP email service usually operates over internet port 25. Many servers also support ESMTP or Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol for the transfer of multimedia files. Since SMTP email providers are only able to handle text files and no multimedia files.
The SMTP Setup
When it comes to bulk email marketing, you need the best SMTP service provider in order get the work done. Some of these are DuoCircle SMTP, Amazon SES and many more. Visit Duocircle for your SMTP Email needs.
The common providers are Google and Yahoo which use different SMTP ports like 587 and 465 respectively. In order to provide services and function properly, the SMTP service providers need the best software at their disposal. And the higher configuration we desire the price for the software increases exponentially. Some of the cheap SMTP service providers are
The establishment of SMTP service by SMTP email hosting providers is not an easy task and the most important of all, security matters. Since, it becomes easy to send spams wherever and whoever, if left unchecked. The smtp email service providers had to reconfigure and install various filters in order to protect the client’s system from virus and hackers. This also includes traceable IP addresses of the sender. Some of the hosts are SiteGround, BlueHost, etc. One more thing one must keep in mind that SMTP is all about the transfer of message and not the content. Various organizations have different requirements and the selection of the hosts and software for the installation of SMTP email service should be done with extensive care. For instance, the availability of the message on the server once it is downloaded on the receiver’s side and the ways to transfer email from one end to other, like installing different programs on the same system where the email will be shared or transferring to other system where the further processing takes place.
Leave a Reply