History of Email
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Electronic mail, or what we know better as email or e-mail, is a technology that allows us to exchange messages digitally. How an e-mail works is that a computer server accepts, forwards, delivers and subsequently stores messages on our behalf.
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An email has two components, named the message header and the message body. The header is what has the control information, like the subject, the sender’s address and whether it has been sent to multiple users, while the body contains the actual message.
Originally devised as a text-only medium of communication, the email was later modified to deliver multi-media attachments. The process was standardized in with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, or what is collectively known as Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME.
The way e-mail functions today was brought into existence during the time of the early ARPANET, and this time period was in 1973, when guidelines for encoding messages were suggested. Which means an email sent by us in this day and age is quite akin to the email sent during the early 1970s. The ARPANET was converted to the Internet. This occurrence took place in the early 1980s, and the core methodology of the email as it is today, was formed.
During the time of the APRANET, network-based email used to be exchanged in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol or FTP. Today there has been significant development in this method, and the same function is carried on by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP, which was first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982.
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