Aug 17
What do MUA, MX and POP3 mean? How is your e-mail delivered? More on these…
How does e-mail really work? What pathways are followed, which protocols are used and how it gets delivered to joe@domain.com and not to jon@domai.com is not really understood, despite millions e-malling everyday.
Local Deliveries
Let’s assume that your e-mail address is name@domain.com and you are using an e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird to send and receive e-mails. This is known as Mail User Agent (MUA). For sending mails, the MUA users Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to a mail Transfer Agent (MTA) like Gmail. In some cases, if the user is directly using the Web mail interface, the MUA does not come in the picture. Read the rest of this entry »
