Email is a method of exchanging “mail” between people using electronic devices. Both text documents and multimedia attachments can be sent through email from a sender to a recipient as long as the sender knows the email address of the intended recipient(s). Emails can be sent to multiple people as secondary recipients, the CC field can be used to get someone to receive a Carbon Copy of the email, The BCC field (Blind Carbon Copy) can be used to do the same as CC but without any other recipients seeing the BCC’d email address at all.
Technipages Explains E-Mail
The term Email was only popularised in its specific meaning in the early 1990s, the term electronic mail had been used to include fax documents in some cases. The first email system was invented at MIT in 1965 and was called MAILBOX and was used to send messages to users on the same mainframe. In 1972 Ray Tomlinson devised a way to send email from one computer to another through including the use of the “@” symbol in the format “Name-of-user@Name-of-computer”. (Using a specific name for an individual computer was possible in the early days of the pre-internet ARPANET due to the significantly smaller scale.) This format has stuck with domain names replacing the name of the specific computer. Originally email was limited to use only ASCII characters but in 1996 the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) extensions were proposed and standardised allow the sending of other character sets and multimedia objects.
Spam or malicious emails were reported to make up 59.56% of all email sent according to research performed by Kaspersky labs in 2017.
Common Uses of E-Mail
- Email “spam” is unsolicited bulk email.
- Email has been widely accepted by business, governments and non-governmental organizations in the developed world.
- Today’s email systems are based on a store-and-forward model.
Common Misuses of E-Mail
- Emails are postcards sent electronically.
