Reading Email with Pine: Concepts of Email

Email (or e-mail) is short for Electronic Mail. Analogous to paper mail (called Snail-mail), you write out your message, address it and mail it out. The difference is that all of this is done on the computer and you do not need any paper. Most commonly, email is sent over the Internet. In short, email allows people to communicate electronically through the Internet.

Email Addresses:

A person who has an Internet email address usually has a unique address (some people have more than one address and others have to share an address). An Internet email address is of the form username@computer.node. Note the AT symbol ( '@') in between the username and computer node. All Internet email addresses use this format with the AT in the middle.

The username is the identification of the person on the computer he/she uses to receive email. At UIC, the username is the netid of the person. The computer.node the computer on which the user receives email. At UIC, the computer.node is usually uic.edu.

If you have an email address, you have an electronic PO box on a computer. Any mail that is sent to the email address is stored in this Electronic PO Box. When you read your email, you are acessing this electronic box and reading mail from it. This electronic PO Box usually is called your INBOX. In pine, all your incoming mail appears in your INBOX.

Examples:

• nobody@uillinois.edu is the email address of a person called nobody. His netid is nobody and the machine where his email is received is uillinois.edu
• willowisp@nowhere.com is the email address of the Will of the Wisp. The netid is willowisp and the machine where its email is received is nowhere.com
• itl@uic.edu is the email address of the Instructional Technology Lab. The netid is itl and the machine which receives email is uic.edu.

At UIC, uic.edu is a special machine that knows whether you read email on tigger or icarus or UICVM and automatically forwards the email to that machine.

Types of Email Addresses:

It is possible to figure out where the email is going by looking at the email address.

You will notice that the computer.node part of an email address ends with a three letter extension. The most common extensions are:

• com - Commercial site (businesses, commercial institutes etc.)
• edu - Educational site (Universities, schools etc.)
• mil - Military site (army, navy, air force etc.)
• gov - Government site (whitehouse, IRS, DofE etc.)
• org - Organization site(non-commercial organization)
• net - Network site (usually entities that build/maintain the Internet)
• and there are plenty of others.

Examples:

• abcdef@aol.com is an email address at a commercial site (com). This address is sent to America Online.
• xyz@uic.edu is an email address at a educational site (edu). This is being sent to UIC.
• someone@navy.mil is an email at a military site (mil). This is being sent to the navy.

How does Email get from source to destination?

Email is handled by specialized servers called SMTP servers. When you send your email, it is sent to the closest SMTP server. These servers communicate with each other and pass email notes to each other. Mail is sorted and sent to the SMTP server that is closer to the destination of the email. Soon, it reaches the SMTP server that serves the computer on which the addressee has the account and the mail is delivered. In short, email travels over the Internet from SMTP server to SMTP server until it reaches its destination. This process is usually faster than regular snail mail.