Electronic mail - email

Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems. Historically, a variety of electronic mail system designs evolved that were often incompatible or not interoperable.

Modern e-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only connect to the e-mail infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message transmission or retrieval to or from their designated server. Rarely is e-mail transmitted directly from one user's device to another. If the email system is for serving internal an entity communication, the emails are transmitted on the local network infrastructure. if the email system is for communicate to around the world, the emails are transferred from one network to another network to reach the destination, of course the infrastructure is the Internet. We should connect to Internet to use the email service in this case. Currently, the term email is in used in general of the Internet email.

While, originally, e-mail consisted only of text messages composed in the ASCII character set, virtually any media format can be sent today, including attachments of audio and video clips.

End-users access to the email by either PC application or the web application or both depending on service provider. The famous email applications are Outlook Express which is shipped along with the Microsoft Operating System (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, windows XP...), Microft Outlook (an advanced application in Microsoft Office package), Thunderbird (an opensource software), Lotus Note (Lotus'es product, acquired by IBM now)...

Anyway, over the Internet, there are many free email service providing to people around the world and all of them can be accessed via web browser. Famous ones are: Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo mail...