1

Electronic Mail

• Architecture and Services

• The User Agent

• Message Formats - MIME

• Message Transfer - SMTP

• Final Delivery POP3 IMAP

2

Electronic Mail (2)

Some smileys. They will not be on the final exam :-).

3

Architecture and Services

Basic functions• Composition• Transfer• Reporting• Displaying• Disposition

4

The User Agent

Envelopes and messages. (a) Paper mail. (b) Electronic mail.

5

Reading E-mail

An example display of the contents of a mailbox.

6

Message Formats – RFC 822

RFC 822 header fields related to message transport.

7

Message Formats – RFC 822 (2)

Some fields used in the RFC 822 message header.

8

MIME – Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions

Problems with international languages:

• Languages with accents (French, German).

• Languages in non-Latin alphabets (Hebrew, Russian).

• Languages without alphabets (Chinese, Japanese).

• Messages not containing text at all (audio or images).

9

MIME (2)

RFC 822 headers added by MIME.

10

MIME (3)

The MIME types and subtypes defined in RFC 2045.

11

MIME (4)

A multipart message containing enriched and audio alternatives.

12

Message Transfer

SMTP – The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

port 25

Transferring a message from

elinore@abc.com to carolyn@xyz.com.

13

Mailreader

Maildaemon

SMTP/TCP

Mail gateway

Maildaemon

SMTP/TCP

Mailreader

Maildaemon

Sequence of Mail Gateways store and forward email messages

14

Final Delivery

(a) Sending and reading mail when the receiver has a permanent Internet connection and the user agent runs on the same machine as the message transfer agent. (b) Reading e-mail when the receiver has a dial-up connection to an ISP.

15

POP3 (Post Office Protocol Version 3)

Using POP3 to fetch three messages.

16

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol)

A comparison of POP3 and IMAP.