The term electronic mail has been in use with its modern meaning since 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since 1979:
• email is now the common form, and recommen… See more

Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible after the advent of time-sharing in the early 1960s, with a notable implementation by MIT's CTSS project in 1965. Most developers … See more

The following is a typical sequence of events that takes place when sender Alice transmits a message using a mail user agent (MUA) addressed to the email address of the recipient.
1. The … See more

The basic Internet message format used for email is defined by RFC 5322, with encoding of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Ma… See more

Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents (MTAs); and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents (MDAs, … See more