E-mail Delivery
Delivering e-mail can be thought of as a three-stage process, very much like sending a
letter through the local post office.
1. You take your letter to the post office and put it in the
mailbox.
2. The postal service delivers your letter to the post office at the far end.
3. The recipient goes to the post office and picks up the letter.
In this analogy, your post office is actually a server host at Rutgers
University that routes/handles your e-mail. The post office box is a
mailbox file on the server host. to access your e-mail, you need an account (username) and
a password.
How e-mail works
When you address an e-mail message, you use the format username@domainname.
In this format, username is the account name assigned to you by Rutgers
University or your service provider, and domainname is the name of the domain
registered by Rutgers University or you service provider. Both username and domainname
are unique to help ensure that e-mail messages are delivered to the intended recipient.
For example faculty member John Smith has a username of jsmith, and his domainname
is rci.rutgers.edu. His e-mail address is jsmith@rci.rutgers.edu or if
John Smith is a student and he has a username of jsmith, and his domainname
is eden.rutgers.edu. His e-mail address is jsmith@eden.rutgers.edu.
E-mail is actually composed of two e-mail systems: the first system is used to send
e-mail messages from you to another user's e-mail post office, and the second system is
used by you to retrieve e-mail messages so they can be read.
Sending e-mail
The first of these two systems uses the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) to
send e-mail from one e-mail system or post office to another. When you address an e-mail
message, you use the format username@domainname.
In order to send e-mail successfully you must have the right address of the person you
are e-mailing, the SMTP server at the far end must be able to find the
recipient's mailbox, and be able to write to it.
If these conditions are not met your message will "bounce" (be
undeliverable) and you will get some sort of an error message from one of the following
sources:
1. Your e-mail program
2. Your SMTP server
3. The SMTP server at the far end
If this happens, check your information and try again. Here is a sample of a returned
message.
SAMPLE
Subject: failure notice
Date: 31 Aug 1998 14:10:12 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@erebus.rutgers.edu
To: jsmith@rci.rutgers.edu
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at erebus.rutgers.edu.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<no_one@rci.rutgers.edu>:
Sorry, no mailbox here by that name.
----END SAMPLE-----
Receiving e-mail
When you want to check your mailbox for messages, you start your e-mail client program.
We suggest that you use IMAP to access e-mail.
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing
electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a mail server. For example,
e-mail stored on an IMAP server can be manipulated from a desktop computer at home a
workstation at the office, and a notebook computer while traveling, without the need to
transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers.
Note: For in-depth information about IMAP and its advantages over POP, please visit the
Official IMAP web site at: http://www.imap.org/
