Email

I finished reading the section about Email in the activebook today. Here's a quick summary:

Email is a very simple technology usually used over the internet. To use email (electronic mail), users need an email client and access to a mail server (usually over the internet). The steps for sending an email are:

1. The user specifies who the email is being sent to using email headers and types his email. Other headers include subject, time, etc.
2. Using an email client, the message is sent to an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) relay server on port 25 (usually the user's ISP's server).
3. The SMTP relay server sends the message to the right email server (using the headers of the message).
4. The message is stored on the recipient's email server until the recipient tries accessing the message.
5. The message is then sent to the user's client using either POP3 (Post Office Protocol) at port 110 or IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) at port 143.
6. The message is stored on the receiver's computer and can be viewed using the email client.

The use of email has grown very fast because of it's reliability. While traditional mail could take days to reach the receiver, emails can be sent within minutes. Emails also allow sending attachments, which could be almost any type of file. Another benefit of using emails is that the user can keep copies of all the emails he received in his entire life! As opposed to traditional mail, where a paper can easily get lost, or phone lines, where no copies of the conversation can be kept.

Personally, I mainly use 2 email accounts:
1. Gmail - Probably the best free email service available on the web. Gmail provides you with all the storage space you need, a great interface, an intelligent spam filter, and much more.
2. Hotmail - Probably the most known email service on the web. Although the interface may be slow and annoying sometimes, and the provided storage space is not as large as Gmail's, a Hotmail account allowes you to use Windows Live Messenger (an IM client which we will discuss later), and therefore has many users. Personally, I barely use my Hotmail account for email, but use it extensively for IM.

Another provider is Yahoo, which also has a pretty good user base. However I never really felt it competed with Gmail and Hotmail too much. In addition to the email service providers above, most ISPs provide their users with emails too.