Many people use email on a regular basis but we never stop to think about how it works and how important and beneficial understating is can actually be. The email process seems rather simple; you simply log into your email account, a click with the mouse, and before you know it you have read the message waiting, replied to it, and sent your own email. Although it seems simple; there is a lot of technology going on behind the scenes. There are two standards used in sending and receiving electronic mail: Post Office Protocol (POP) and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP).
POP is responsible for storing email messages, comparable a mailbox or post office box. It sits there waiting for you to check it. SMTP is responsible for sending and receiving of the email. Both of these email protocols allow a person to manage one mail account from another mail program. To give an example, you can set up your POP or SMTP to transfer your business email into your computers email (i.e. outlook express). When you check your outlook express email it will have downloaded any new message from your business account and you can then send messages just as if you were logged into your business account, without actually having to be logged in.
Once you sign on to your email accounts at yahoo, hotmail, AOL, gmail, etc. the computer sends out and gets informational notices from the SMTP server of the email website. The SMTP server then gets the sent mail via a port. Various ports are assigned for specific jobs. Then the SMTP server sorts the website and user names. If the website name and the mail website where it originated are determined to be a match, it sends the mail to its POP server and continues the procedure of sending the new mail.
The SMTP cannot currently verify that the sender of the email messages are in fact who they claim to be and this has become a big problem. This reason has increased issues with spam as well as issues that are more malicious, i.e. the transfer of viruses. If a malicious program gets into your email account, it can search the inbox and collect all the names in your contact list. It then can attach a virus to an email and send it to everyone. Because this is sent using your name, the receivers are more likely to trust it and open it causing a virus to cause harm to their computer.
Though efforts are on, it will take some more time to make the SMTP fully secure to use. For the time being, what you can do to secure your messages and even your computer is to have a unique password. Your password has to be such a one where some letters, symbols and some numbers are mixed together so that your identity is concealed.
SMTP and email sounds so easy but it can be far more long winded. If you’re having problems with your email or finding an open SMTP relay take a look at the SMTServerList.com
