E-Mail

An e-mail – electronic mail – is a letter-like electronic message. Today e-mail is the most frequently used service on the internet (even more than www), but a large amount of messages is spam. The invention of e-mail goes back to the American engineer Ray Tomlinson, who dealt with the installation of ARPANET during his time at BBN. In 1971 he developed programs such as „SNDMSG“ and „READMAIL“. Originally the scientific computer network was not designed primarily for transmitting messages, but only a short time after the invention of e-mail, mail traffic made up the majority of the data volume.

The format of an e-mail was determined in an RFC. Every message consists of a header and a body. The header contains basic information such as recipient, sender, date and intermediate stations of transmission, while the body contains the actual message.
Today most e-mails are transmitted via SMTP.