E-mail

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Electronic mail, often abbreviated as e-mail or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use. A message at least consists of its content, an author address and one or more recipient addresses. The foundation for today's global Internet email service was created in the early Arpanet and was codified as a standard for encoding of messages, as RFC 733. An email sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from Arpanet to Internet in the early 1980s produced the modern details of the current, core service, with transport provided by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982, and a revision of RFC 733 to be Internet Standard 11 (RFC 822). Multi-media content attachments were standardized in 1996 with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

Email systems that operate over a network (rather than being limited to a single, shared machine) are based on a store-and-forward model in which email computer server systems accept, forward, deliver or store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the email infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message submission to, or retrieval from, their designated server. Rarely is email transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.