Assignment-Web Services 1

e-mail

Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Invented by Ray Tomlinson, email first entered limited use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email. Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet. Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but as of 2017 it has not been widely adopted.

The history of modern Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages published as early as 1973. An email message sent in the early 1970s looks very similar to a basic email sent today. Email had an important role in creating the Internet,and the conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services.

Advantages of emails

• Emails are easy to use. You can organize your daily correspondence, send and receive electronic messages and save them on computers.
• Emails are fast. They are delivered at once around the world. No other form of written communication is as fast as an email.
• The language used in emails is simple and informal.
• When you reply to an email you can attach the original message so that when you answer the recipient knows what you are talking about. This is important if you get hundreds of emails a day.
• It is possible to send automated emails with a certain text. In such a way it is possible to tell the sender that you are on vacation. These emails are called auto responders.
• Emails do not use paper. They are environment friendly and save a lot of trees from being cut down.
• Emails can also have pictures in them. You can send birthday cards or newsletters as emails.
• Products can be advertised with emails. Companies can reach a lot of people and inform them in a short time.

Disadvantages of emails

• Emails may carry viruses. These are small programs that harm your computer system. They can read out your email address book and send themselves to a number of people around the world.
• Many people send unwanted emails to others. These are called spam mails. It takes a lot of time to filter out the unwanted emails from those that are really important.
• Emails cannot really be used for official business documents. They may be lost and you cannot sign them.
• Your mailbox may get flooded with emails after a certain time so you have to empty it from time to time.