In the modern world, use of information technology has increased tremendously in the majority of day to day activities. The business and corporate fields have assumed a leading role in application of information technologies to enhance implementation of their operations. Large corporations and multinationals require constant and reliable methods of communication within their distributed business network. Consequently, they employ electronic mails (e-mails) to exchange information with their clients, customers, and other stakeholders within the entire business network. As a matter of fact, e-mail service has become a common and the most convenient means of communication at both the corporate and personal levels (Levine, Young , & Barou, 2011). This paper will discuss how an e-mail server works to facilitate sending and receiving of electronic mails over the Internet.
Through the use of an e-mail service, a person can send a message through a computer or a hand-held gadget such as a smartphone or a PDA. This information is then retrieved at the receiver’s terminal after he or she logs in to his or her e-mail account. Computers at these two terminals are called clients; for these two devices to communicate effectively, an e-mail server is required to connect them. E-mail services are compatible with the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the basic method of sending or receiving electronic mails over the Internet. After e-mails reach the recipient’s end, there are other two categories of protocols that deal with retrieving and storing them: the Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) as well as the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Mails in each of these two categories are sorted out differently on the server. An e-mail server comprises of both the hardware and software constituents (Levine, Young , & Barou, 2011). MDaemon Messaging Server is common software that runs on e-mail servers. The mail server establishes a connection that is supposed to be accessed by a client.
To begin with, a POP3 client directs a request to the server to allow it access the account and transfer the information to the e-mail client device. This implies that the information is saved locally to the client device and can be accessed even when there is no Internet connection. In addition, the e-mail is deleted from the server. On the other hand, once the IMAP mail client accesses the server, it stores the mail on it. As a result, users can only access the information provided they have an established Internet connection with the mail server (Levine, Young , & Barou, 2011).
It is worth noting that both protocols discussed above use the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to route information from the sender through the server and, finally, to the recipient. SMTP is employed in the process of sending e-mails to the respective recipients. In case the mail cannot reach its terminus, the server routes a message to the sender using SMTP, informing him/her about the failure and the reason behind it (Levine, Young , & Barou, 2011). The advantage of SMTP is that it allows the sender to realize whether the sent e-mail reached the targeted recipient or not. Thus, SMTP is a very reliable protocol.
E-mail servers are very helpful for business companies and other organizations in the modern world; they execute a large number of operations every minute, which facilitates electronic communication over the Internet or through a local area network. In order to use this service, an individual (or a party) is required to sign up for an online e-mail account to allow sending and receiving of mails (Levine, Young , & Barou, 2011). Normally, for authentication purposes, a user is required to enter the username and password in order to access his or her e-mail account.