Electronic mail (email, e-mail, eMail or e-Mail) is a method of exchanging messages (“mail”) between people using electronic devices. Email entered limited use in the 1960s, but users could only send to users of the same computer, and some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online simultaneously, similar to instant messaging. Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.
Email gives an excellent opportunity to coolly compose your thoughts, couch it in appropriate language and put it in writing, go through it over and again, fine tuning or revising it before you hit the send button. You don’t have that kind of advantage in a telephone conversation. Many time you forget what you planned to say.
Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet. Today’s email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.
Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, is standardized but not widely adopted.
The history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages published as early as 1973 (RFC 561). An email message sent in the early 1970s is similar to a basic email sent today.
Historically, the term electronic mail is any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to refer to fax document transmission. As a result, finding its first use is difficult with the specific meaning it has today.
The term electronic mail has been in use with its current meaning since at least 1975, and variations of the shorter E-mail have been in use since at least 1979:
- Email is now the common form, and recommended by style guides. It is the form required by IETF Requests for Comments (RFC) and working groups. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.
- E-mail is the form favored in edited published American English and British English writing as reflected in the Corpus of Contemporary American English data, but is falling out of favor in some style guides.
- Email is a traditional form used in RFCs for the “Author’s Address” and is required “for historical reasons“.
- E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial E as in similar abbreviations like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, and H-bomb.
In the original protocol, RFC 524, none of these forms was used. The service is simply referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.
An Internet e-mail consists of an envelope and the content consists of a header and a body.
Message format
The basic Internet message format used for email is defined by RFC 5322, with encoding of non-ASCII data and multimedia content attachments defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions or MIME. The extensions in International email apply only to email. RFC 5322 replaced the earlier RFC 2822 in 2008, then RFC 2822 in 2001 replaced RFC 822 – the standard for Internet email for decades. Published in 1982, RFC 822 was based on the earlier RFC 733 for the ARPANET.
Internet email messages consist of two sections, ‘header’ and ‘body’. These are known as ‘content’. The header is structured into fields such as From, To, CC, Subject, Date, and other information about the email. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters and information using message header fields. The body contains the message, as unstructured text, sometimes containing a signature block at the end. The header is separated from the body by a blank line.
Message header
RFC 5322 specifies the syntax of the email header. Each email message has a header (the “header section” of the message, according to the specification), comprising a number of fields (“header fields”). Each field has a name (“field name” or “header field name”), followed by the separator character “:”, and a value (“field body” or “header field body”).
Each field name begins in the first character of a new line in the header section, and begins with a non-whitespace printable character. It ends with the separator character “:”. The separator follows the field value (the “field body”). The value can continue onto subsequent lines if those lines have space or tab as their first character. Field names and, without SMTPUTF8, field bodies are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Some non-ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded words.
Header fields
Email header fields can be multi-line, with each line recommended to be no more than 78 characters, although the limit is 998 characters. Header fields defined by RFC 5322 contain only US-ASCII characters; for encoding characters in other sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 may be used. In some examples, the IETF EAI working group defines some standards track extensions, replacing previous experimental extensions so UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters may be used within the header. In particular, this allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters. Such addresses are supported by Google and Microsoft products, and promoted by some government agents.
The message header must include at least the following fields:
- From: The email address, and, optionally, the name of the author(s). Some email clients are changeable through account settings.
- Date: The local time and date the message was written. Like the From: field, many email clients fill this in automatically before sending. The recipient’s client may display the time in the format and time zone local to them.
RFC 3864 describes registration procedures for message header fields at the IANA; it provides for permanent and provisional field names, including also fields defined for MIME, netnews, and HTTP, and referencing relevant RFCs. Common header fields for email include:
- To: The email address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message’s recipient(s). Indicates primary recipients (multiple allowed), for secondary recipients see Cc: and Bcc: below.
- Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are commonly used in the subject, including “RE:” and “FW:”.
- Cc: Carbon copy; Many email clients mark email in one’s inbox differently depending on whether they are in the To: or Cc: list.
- Bcc: Blind carbon copy; addresses are usually only specified during SMTP delivery, and not usually listed in the message header.
- Content-Type: Information about how the message is to be displayed, usually a MIME type.
- Precedence: commonly with values “bulk”, “junk”, or “list”; used to indicate automated “vacation” or “out of office” responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from sent to all other subscribers of a mailing list. Sendmail uses this field to affect prioritization of queued email, with “Precedence: special-delivery” messages delivered sooner. With modern high-bandwidth networks, delivery priority is less of an issue than it was. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress field.
- Message-ID: Also an automatic-generated field to prevent multiple deliveries and for reference in In-Reply-To: (see below).
- In-Reply-To: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to. Used to link related messages together. This field only applies to reply messages.
- References: Message-ID of the message this is a reply to, and the message-id of the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.
- Reply-To: Address should be used to reply to the message.
- Sender: Address of the sender acting on behalf of the author listed in the From: field (secretary, list manager, etc.).
- Archived-At: A direct link to the archived form of an individual email message.
- The To: field may be unrelated to the addresses to which the message is delivered. The delivery list is supplied separately to the transport protocol, SMTP, which may be extracted from the header content. The “To:” field is similar to the addressing at the top of a conventional letter delivered according to the address on the outer envelope. In the same way, the “From:” field may not be the sender. Some mail servers apply email authentication systems to messages relayed. Data pertaining to the server’s activity is also part of the header, as defined below.
SMTP defines the trace information of a message saved in the header using the following two fields:
- Received: after an SMTP server accepts a message, it inserts this trace record at the top of the header (last to first).
- Return-Path: after the delivery SMTP server makes the final delivery of a message, it inserts this field at the top of the header.
Other fields added on top of the header by the receiving server may be called trace fields.
- Authentication-Results: after a server verifies authentication, it can save the results in this field for consumption by downstream agents.
- Received-SPF: stores results of SPF checks in more detail than Authentication-Results.
- DKIM-Signature: stores results of DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) decryption to verify the message was not changed after it was sent.
- Auto-Submitted: is used to mark automatic-generated messages.
- VBR-Info: claims VBR whitelisting
Importance
Easy to use: E-mail frees us from the tedious task of managing data for daily use. It helps us manage our contacts, send mails quickly, maintain our mail history, store the required information, etc.
Speed: An e-mail is delivered instantly and anywhere across the globe. No other service matches the e-mail in terms of speed.
Easy to prioritize: Because e-mails come with a subject line, it is easy to prioritize them and ignore the unwanted ones.
Reliable and secure: Constant efforts are being taken to improve the security in electronic mails. It makes e-mail one of the secured ways of communication.
Informal and conversational: The language used in e-mails is generally simple and thus, makes the process of communication informal. Sending and receiving e-mails takes less time, so it can be used as a tool for interaction.
Easier for reference: When a person needs to reply to a mail, he/she can use the provision of attaching previous mails as references. It helps refresh the recipient’s know-how on what he is reading.
Automated e-mails: It is possible to send automated e-mails using special programs like auto responders. The auto responders reply only to those messages with generalized, prewritten text messages.
Environment friendly: Postal mails use paper as a medium to send letters. Electronic mail therefore, prevents a large number of trees from getting axed. It also saves the fuel needed for transportation.
Use of graphics: Colourful greeting cards and interesting pictures can be sent through e-mails. This adds value to the e-mail service. Advertising tool: Nowadays, many individuals and companies are using the e-mail service to advertise their products, services, etc.
Info at your fingertips: Storing data online means less large, space taking file cabinets, folders and shelves. You can access information far quicker if you learn how to use email this way.
Leverage: Send the same message to any number of people. Adaptations are simple, too. If you have a product or service to sell, email is an effective medium to get your message out.
Send reminders to yourself. Do you use more than one account? Email yourself messages from work to home or vice versa.
Objectives
- Inform
One of the main objectives of an email marketing campaign is to inform your readers. Showing up in your customers’ inboxes regularly presents a great opportunity to keep them informed about everything and anything about your company.
- Engage
Not only should they be informational, beneficial, and attractive, but you should also be sure that they engage recipients so they will want to learn more about your business and your brand as a whole. Make your emails engaging with images, graphics, and even videos to make sure that recipients read the emails in their entirety and digest all of the information you’ve provided.
- Attract
Another objective of email marketing is to attract users to your company. You may think that since current customers have already committed to your company, that there’s no need to attract them anymore. The truth is, current customers have the choice to stop buying products or services from your brand whenever they choose, and email marketing is a great way to ensure that you consistently win them over.
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