How Does Email Work?

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I’ve been studying email servers and the various protocols they use to keep emails secure and get the data where its going, but do I really understand how email works? Not really. Let’s take a deep dive and find out what happens when you hit send.

Step 1: You send your email

An email is made up of three parts:

  • SMTP envelope
  • header
  • body

Step 2: The email leaves your computer and goes to another computer configured to work as an SMTP server.

Step 3: The SMTP server has to ask another server for the IP address of the email recipient’s domain; this is the DNS server.

Step 4:

References

https://medium.com/building-mailmodo/how-does-email-work-a-dummies-guide-bd1ef894797e

https://www.mailmodo.com/guides/email-authentication

Internet Message Format RFC 5322

https://itgeeknotes.blogspot.com/2017/07/brief-of-email-anti-spoofing.html

https://itgeeknotes.blogspot.com/2017/07/email-eliminate-confusion-between.html