Understanding Email

Understanding Email

Everybody knows what email is, right? Nowadays in this business world, email became one of our most important methods of communication, and indeed ordinarily a web hosting client considers the entire process of his email more important than the website itself. Unfortunately however, most people have only a very superficial idea of how email does work, so when trouble does arise, other webcam matches idea how to troubleshoot the issue and it takes longer to resolve. Just by knowing the basics of the way email works, it is possible to give a more accurate problem description to technical support personnel and even solve some problems yourself! You could even find some new and useful options that come with your email that you didn't know about before. Why don't we get started. email

What exactly is a real world address?

The short answer is that the email address is a user account of a particular domain name that is hosted somewhere. That website name can be your own or one that someone else lets you have an account on, like yahoo.com or gmail.com. No matter what, the domain have to be hosted, not simply registered. The web hosting server is what provides the software for you and receive mail and the disk space to keep received messages inside a mailbox file.

All internet hosting accounts come with the opportunity to create user email accounts. To create the email address myname@mydomain.com, you would log into your hosting cpanel for mydomain.com and make up a new user called "myname" from the user account management area and develop a password for that user. Once this is done, an internet-accessible mailbox is produced on the server that you can begin using to send and receive email by whatever connection methods your host allows.

How are you affected when I check my email?

Before we start this answer, there are two types of email accounts which you can use, POP and IMAP. POP (Postal service Protocol) is by far the most common and is what we will discuss first. IMAP will be described separately below.

Once we said above, every email has a username plus a password. Wherever you join to check your email, be it a web-based interface like hotmail.com or perhaps email client like Outlook Express, you need to provide your password to receive mail. The username tells the server which mailbox file to retrieve or display the mail from, and also the password confirms your identity to prove to the server that you will be authorized to receive the mail. The server has passwords stored in a file from the moment your account was created, and if you log in, it compares the password you provide using the password it has on record. If they match, then the server allows you to get the mail in your mailbox. email

All passwords are case-sensitive, so if your original password is "PassWord" and you also try to log in with "password", it's not going to work. Usernames are not case-sensitive, however, therefore the server will recognize you whether you log in as "MyName" or "myname".

What is the difference between web-based email and ultizing an email client?

The 2 primary ways to access a contact account are from a web-based interface or while on an email client program, like Eudora, Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. Here's that they work:

1. Web-Based Mail: This sort of access is done via your web browser. You would browse to a particular web page that has a login area coupled to the web hosting server that houses your. You put in your password and you are conveyed with a page that displays the belongings in your mailbox for the server. From here read, reply to, forward or delete mail you've got received, or generate and send new messages. This is done through a mail program running on the server such as Horde, Squirrelmail, or NeoMail, or possibly a custom interface like those utilized by Yahoo!, GMail, etc. Some servers even provide you with the option of logging in through different mail programs, based on which one you like better. You have access to web-based mail from anywhere on earth where you have internet access.

Whenever you use a web-based interface to manage your mail, you are accessing the valuables in your mailbox for the server directly. In the event the server allows you 20 megabytes of disk space on your mailbox, then this is the maximum amount of mail you could have in your box at anybody time. If you fill up all of that space, you will not be able to receive any more mail unless you delete some messages or buy your host to give you more space for storing, so your ability to archive messages is restricted. If you delete a communication, then it is gone forever. Web-based mail is pretty slow because your computer is continuously making connections together with the mail server, and a lot web-based mail programs have fairly limited features.

2. Email Clients: Prehaps you are familiar with email programs including Microsoft Outlook or Eudora. They are what is known as an email client. Email clients are only able to be accessed in the computer on which this program is installed, but instead of only being able to access one server such as the web-based mail programs, a contact client can be created to check multiple email options hosted on different servers at the same time. All you need to check an email address from an email account are the following settings:

 Username
 Password
 POP3 (Incoming Mail) Server
 SMTP (Outgoing Mail) Server

You know about the username and password, and also the two mail servers inform your email client finding the web hosting server that your account resides on then it can connect to the mail software with that computer and allow that you send and receive mail. If you sign up for a web hosting account, the hosting provider will tell you what the names of such servers are, and they are generally usually related to your domain name. A typical POP3 server name can be mail.mydomain.com or pop3.mydomain.com.

The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server is really a separate part of the server's mail software which handles outgoing email. Its name might seem like mail.mydomain.com or smtp.mydomain.com. Most servers need you to check your incoming mail first, thereby verify your identity along with your password, before they are going to allow you to send mail out. Normally servers will store this verification for Half an hour before requiring you to check your mail again. Some internet providers (ISPs), such as Earthlink and SBC, may need you to use their corporate SMTP servers rather than the one set up along with your domain, in order to help them to control junk email being sent out through their network. You will discover what their SMTP server is by contacting the ISP's support or looking it up on their website.

A key improvement in how an email client works in contrast to a webbased interface would be that the email client downloads the contents of the mailbox to your computer's hard drive and removes them out of your mailbox on the server. Using this method, you can store the maximum amount of old email as your hard drive can hold and also you rarely have to worry about your disk space for the server getting full if you check your mail frequently. In the event you go a long time without checking your email or else you receive several large attachments, your mailbox on the server can still get full, but as soon as you look at the mail with the mail client, the mailbox is emptied being a regular postal mailbox as well as the cycle starts over. An e-mail client usually also has a larger range of features, such as address books, mail filtering and folder storage options, read receipt notices and other things that a web-based program can't handle as it would bog the server down wanting to handle all that for hundreds or 1000s of accounts.

The downside of utilizing an email client is you can only check the mail no matter where you have the client set up with your account settings entered into it. If you want to look at the mail from two different computers, then whichever computer checks the mail first can get it and the other one won't, the same as two people checking the corner mailbox. Most email clients possess a setting that allows you to leave a copy of messages around the server so that multiple computers can get the same mail, however this has to be carefully coordinated on the list of different computers involved. A much more convenient way to do this can be using the IMAP protocol, as you will notice below.

Can I use both web-based mail as well as an email client at the same time?

Yes, absolutely. Many individuals use an email client when they are in their office or at home and check their mail with the web-based interface provided by their service provider when they are away from their computer. One dosen't interfere with the other.

What's IMAP?

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) was designed to solve the problem of checking mail from multiple computers in an email client. When you are checking mail on multiple computers using the POP method, then each computer has its own record of how the mail may be managed. If you delete a vintage message on one computer and yet another computer also has a replica of the same message, you'll have to delete it a second time on the other computer in order for both clients to check. IMAP solves this problem to keep the mailbox on the server without sacrificing the consumer software's added functionality. Any client checking an IMAP-enabled email account will see the same mailbox contents no matter where it is, but will always be able to execute all the functions programmed into the client on that mail as if it were utilizing a POP account.

IMAP contains the same disadvantages as web-based email in that you are limited to the volume of disk space allowed from your host and access speed is slow simply because you are accessing an isolated server repeatedly. For this reason, IMAP is much less common than POP email.