If you own a computer, more than likely you're somewhat familiar with email. But here, I'd like to go into detail about the different types and functionality of email services.

First, what is email and how does it work?

Here's a brief explanation that will help you understand the basics of email or electronic mail:

* the sender: a person who composes and sends e-mail messages,
* the mail agent, a program the sender uses to do so; such as Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Eudora
* the message, a computer representation of what the sender wanted to say.
* the mail transport subsystem: a system (that is, a complex collection of programs) that delivers the message; i.e., your ISP sends to your email host - your email host sends to your recipients email host, which then holds on your mail server until you pick it up with your mail agent.
* the recipient, a person who receives the mail
* the recipient's mail agent, which might be a different program from the sender's; Outlook, Outlook Express, GMail, etc.
* the e-mail address, a text string used to identify senders and recipients; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

What other elements are involved in sending and recieving email?

* a server is a program constantly running on some internet site, waiting for other sites to send it requests to perform some service or other (like delivering mail).
* a protocol is a particular collection of types of requests and responses understood by a particular kind of server. Thus Web servers follow HTTP, the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

What comprises a basic email message?

* The header consists of a sequence of tagged header lines; tags are defined by an Internet standard, and include things like To, Subject, CC, and Date. Your mail agent will ask you to supply some of these (such as To), will fill in some by itself (e.g. From and Date), and will allow you to add others (like CC).
* The body: the main part of your message, a simple text message with zero or more attachments; in fact the attachments are encoded as text via a protocol called MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)

What happens when you send your email?

Every Internet site has an Internet Protocol (IP) address, specified as four decimal numbers (each in the range 0-255) separated by dots (120.222.10.85). The transport service sends the site name string to a Domain Name Server (DNS), which translates the name into an IP address. The transport service then starts up an Internet connection to the given IP address, and asks the destination site to deliver mail to the given mailbox.

For this to work, the destination site has to be running a program called a mail server that is listening for requests to deliver mail. At this point the mail server can do one of several things

* Accept the message and store it in the expected mailbox.
* Forward the message somewhere else, usually to a place specified by the owner of the mailbox, but possibly to a mailing list.
* Reject the message as undeliverable, either because the mailbox doesn't exist, or because the mailbox is full, or because the server is facing some temporary problem.

Mail Servers

There are basically two kinds of mail servers, distinguished by the protocol they expect you to use to communicate with them.

SMTP server, where SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The SMTP server handles outgoing mail. The other is either a POP3 server or an IMAP server, both of which handle incoming mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol.

Email can be a very powerful tool, especially for your business. Your Real Estate Virtual Assistant can often help you to setup and manage your email accounts so they're functioning properly and maximizing your effectiveness in marketing your business online.

If you have any questions at all about email services, feel free to call or email us. We're here to help and make the process as smooth and as affordable as possible. Thank you!