How Email Works... Part 2

Back to Part 1 – Sending

Where did we leave off? Oh yes. The eagle has flown! The door opened on the back of your computer, and the pigeon flew out of the box. Now it’s out of your hands and en route to the recipient.

Let’s recap first: You sent the email message, and because you had an Outgoing SMTP server selected in your email client (such as Outlook), your email knew how to get to your ISP for handling. What does SMTP stand for? Simple Mail Transport Protocol. It’s an Internet protocol used for sending mail.

Now that the email is at your ISP, it’s analogous to being at the Post Office for processing.

6. Your ISP’s mail program will lookup the address of the recipient.

Wait! By address, I mean the Internet address. Yes, there is a standardized place for holding all those domain names. It’s called the Internic, and it’s a company that keeps up-to-date databases of what domain names are housed at what ISP. The mail program will look up the domain name of the email address (that’s everything after the @ symbol) and see what ISP it belongs to, just like the regular Postal System will first look at the zip code to find out where the letter should first go.

7. After this, the email gets sent to the recipient’s ISP.

8. Their ISP will now look at everything in front of the @ symbol to see what user the email belongs to, again, much like the street address section of a real letter.

9. Once the ISP knows what user it belongs to, it will dump the email in that user’s mailbox on the server, and there it will stay until the user checks their mail. Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s exactly like how the Postal worker delivers mail to your street address mailbox. But you won’t know it’s there until you open the mailbox yourself and get it!

10. The final step. The recipient opens their email client and downloads their mail to their computer.

When you signed up for an email account, you put in your username and password to check your mail. Just like the Outgoing mail server that most likely configured itself behind the scenes, there is also an Incoming mail server specified. This is the server at your ISP that houses your mail for you until you get it by checking your email.

So there you have it! We’ve followed the email on its long journey through cyberspace to give you a better understanding of how it all works. And you just thought it was a fun way to send greeting cards!