How does email really work
August 17th, 2008
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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 more…
