Alice has a PC and she uses Microsoft Outlook as her user agent. It also allows her to compose messages on her laptop and push them to her mail server to be later delivered to the proper recipient. 4- Alice’s user agentĪgain similar to Bob’s user agent, this is the application running on Alice’s laptop that allows her to fetch emails from her mail server to read. Similar to Bob’s mail server, but it’s a yahoo machine instead of a gmail machine because as I mentioned earlier Alice has a yahoo email account. This remote machine (or more accurately, the application running on this remote machine) is what we call Bob’s mail server. This machine is also in charge of sending email messages sent from Bob to other users on other mail servers. What this means is that there is a remote machine under the domain that manages all the email messages sent to Bob. If Bob wants to send an email message, he composes the message on his user agent, and then pushes it to his mail server to be delivered to the right recipient. If Bob wants to read his email messages, his user agent fetches them from Bob’s mail server (I’ll explain what that is next). This is the application running on Bob’s laptop that he uses to compose, reply to, and read his email messages.īob uses Apple’s Mail app on his MAC as his user agent. What I am going to do now is I am going to track this message all the way from Bob’s laptop until it reaches Alice’s laptop.įirst, let’s lay down all the participating players in the process: 1- Bob’s user agent He composes his message on an application running on his MAC (Apple’s Mail app) and he is ready to click “send”.
Let’s assume Bob has an email account at gmail, has an email account at yahoo, wants to send an email to Alice. A motivating exampleįor the rest of this article, I am going to explain the SMTP protocol and how email works by following the journey of an email message from one person Bob to another Alice. Now instead of me going through the RFC, I’d rather explain how email and SMTP work by walking through a practical example. I have to warn you though, these RFCs are very dry and, well, kind of boring to read.
And later on, more specifications were introduced under RFC 5321. If you feel adventurous and you want to actually read the specifications of the protocol, the original specifications for SMTP were published under RFC 821 in 1982. SMTP is an Internet standard for sending emails on the internet. To understand how email works, you need to understand an internet protocol called SMTP or “simple mail transfer protocol”.
In this article, I am going to teach you step-by-step the full journey of an email message starting from when you click the “send” button until it lands in your friend’s mailbox. How does the email end up at your friend’s mailbox? Ever wondered what happens after you compose an email to your friend and then click the “send” button?
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