How does gpg mail work
How does gpg mail work Offline#
IMAP also supports an offline mode changes are synched with the server the next time you’re online.
How does gpg mail work archive#
You can keep a properly marked archive on your home client as well as on your mail server. It’s like having your mail sent to an assistant at the post office who categorizes it and stores it for you, gives it to you whether you’re at home, at work, or actually there, and makes changes to the stored copies as you do. When you check an email on your phone, it’s marked as read and during the next interaction with the server, that status is sent back so all other clients can be updated with it. All messages are kept on the server so multiple clients can access them. Clients have a two-way communication with their servers. While POP can be considered to be very “client-oriented,” the Internet Message Access Protocol was designed to work in a different way: it’s “server-oriented,” and bi-directional. It’d be tedious to sort through all of that info over several devices, assuming you’ve even kept a copy of each email on the server to begin with. Nowadays, though, it’s common to get email access from your phone’s client, the web interface when you’re away somewhere, and a client when you’re at home. That’s fine if you only ever access mail from one place.
How does gpg mail work download#
Once you download the email to a client, it’s up to the client to sort through its different statuses and so on. POP is a unidirectional protocol information travels one way. You can use POP to grab mail from several different inboxes on several different email servers and consolidate them on one. If you don’t leave a copy on the server, it doesn’t require much space or bandwidth either. You don’t need to stay connected, and aside from leaving a copy on the server, it’s a pretty cut-and-dry procedure. It’s useful because, like a post office, you can pop in, grab all of your mail, and then leave. These two acronyms plague email settings panels everywhere, so let’s take a deeper look at them. Then, your friend goes and fetches the mail, usually using a client that works via POP or IMAP. It decides where exactly to put the mail, much like how your friend’s post office figures out how best to get it delivered. This server is referred to as an MTA, or Mail Transfer Agent. Now that the SMTP server has the proper info, the message gets sent from that server to the target domain’s mail exchange server. This is like your post office consulting maps of where your mail is supposed to go, calling their local post office, and checking to see if your friend has a mailbox or P.O. The DNS server is a sort of phone or address book for the internet it translates domains like “” to an IP address like “74.238.23.45.” Then, it finds out if that domain has any “MX” or mail exchange servers on it and makes a note of it. They’re a sort of abstract thing, so the SMTP server contacts a Domain Name System server. The SMTP server is like your local post office, which checks your postage and address and figures out where to send your mail. When someone, let’s say a spice seller, sends an email, it has to have an address in the form of Our example has The email gets sent by the client to an outgoing mail server via Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It may not make complete sense at first, but it’ll be useful to refer back to. Let’s start with an illustration of the process. A lot of the ideas used in relaying email were important in formulating document transfer, which is at the core of things like bulletin board systems and the world wide web.
Like anything else, there’s an intricate process involved that works behind the scenes to make it seem as seamless as possible. It’s not so easy to get it from point A to point B, however. Over time, it changed and evolved like anything else it has sender and receiver info, a subject line, a message body, and attachments, but on the whole, emails are pretty simple documents. Obviously, both the underlying dynamics and far-reaching consequences weren’t so simple, but it was that notion that brings us to where we are today.Įmail was, at that time, the equivalent of today’s text message. As the story goes, along came Ray Tomlinson who sent the first email by addressing a user on another system using the symbol. The caveat was that you could only send messages to other users on the same system, at least up until 1971. As is the case with any community, people found useful and unique ways to communicate with one another, and a messaging system evolved. People used dial-up terminals to access them, and each machine held storage for multiple users. A long time ago – in technological, not human, terms – computers were giant machines. Electronic mail (abbreviated as e-mail, email, E-Mail, etc.) is a very old form of computer-based communication.