How Email Works

how does email work so that is the topic of this video so as you know email is a quick and convenient way to write and send someone a message especially when compared to the old days of using the post office where you write or type messages on paper putting it inside an envelope and then dropping it off at a mailbox but now we can just write someone a message using our computer tablet or smartphone but have you ever wondered how email works I mean how does email get from one device to to another device across the world in a matter of seconds well email is received and sent by using a couple of different protocols and Protocols are just a set of rules that a service follows in order to function these email Protocols are IMAP POP 3 and SMTP IMAP and POP 3 are used for receiving email while SMTP is used for sending email so the first step is just to open up our email now there are a couple of ways to open up and view your email you can use an email client such as Outlook Apple Mail and Thunderbird or you can simply just use your web browser so in our example we're going to use a generic email client for our email and let's say for example that our email account is a Gmail account the next step is to click on compose and then from here we can type in the email address of the person we want to email so we will email Tom Yahoo . and then we'll fill in the subject line and then write the body of the message and then once that is complete we just press send and after we hit send our part is all done the email is now going to go through the backend process to deliver it to the recipient the next step is that our email client will connect to our outgoing SMTP server because the SMTP server is responsible for sending emails SMTP stands for simple mail transfer for protocol but a good way to remember what SMTP does is by looking at the acronym SMTP and associating it with sending mail to people whenever you configure an email account you have to set up the incoming and outgoing servers so for example if we look at our settings the outgoing SMTP server for our email account is smtp.gmail.com now even though email is a great and convenient way to send messages in today's world the number one problem to solve is securing an organization's email infrastructure email is vulnerable to fraud such as fishing and spoofing with many hackers impersonating and using non-authenticated domains and they use these methods to trick someone to steal sensitive information such as passwords bank accounts credit cards and so on and the best way to protect against spoofing and fishing is DeMark DeMark is a way to make it easier for email senders and receivers to determine whether or not an email is legitimately from a trusted Source Now setting up dmark for your email can be complicated which is why many administrators avoid doing it but fortunately there's easy DeMark easy DeMark makes setting up DeMark with ease it's an all-in-one email authentication and Demar management platform to prevent and monitor fraudulent activity such as poofing email fishing ransomware and business email compromise the platform provides Advanced features such as Demar report analyzer managed SPF dkim email Source reputation monitoring and much more with just a few clicks easyd Mark will guide you on how to set up your authentication journey and then from your dashboard you can view all your email authentication deployment and monitoring needs so if you're interested in securing your email domain you can start a free trial by clicking the link in the description of this video so now when our email reaches the SMTP server the server will validate our emails details such as the message and the attachments to make sure it's in compliance with the email policy and once that's done it will place the email in the outgoing queue so now the Gmail SMTP server needs to to figure out how to deliver the email to Tom yahoo.com and to do this it needs to find the recipient's email server for Tom's mailbox so the first thing that the SMTP server looks at is at the domain name which is yahoo.com but as some of you might already know computers don't understand names they only understand numbers such as IP addresses but in order to convert yahoo.com into a number the SMTP server will ask another server called a DNS server to resolve yahoo.com into an IP address because that's what a DNS server does it converts domain names into an IP address and once it has the IP address it can locate the email server for yahoo.com and start a connection and after the connection has been established our email is broken up into smaller pieces called packets and then travels over the internet and as it's traveling it will go through several outers until it reaches Yahoo's email server then once it reaches Yahoo's email server it's going to perform some Security checks to make sure there's no viruses or spam in the email and then once that is complete it will place the email in Tom's mailbox and then once Tom logs into his email if he's using a web browser he can view the email on the email server itself or if he's using an email client like ours it will download the email to his computer so for example if we look at the incoming and outgoing servers in Tom's email client we will see that he's using IMAP as his incoming email setting or if he was using POP 3 it would look something like this now just to clear things up both IMAP and POP 3 are used to retrieve incoming email but there is a difference on how they do it so for example if an email client is using POP 3 which stands for post office protocol 3 it only downloads the contents of your inbox folder which is where your email is but IMAP does more not only does it download what's in your inbox to your device but it also downloads and syncs your entire email folder structure so whatever is in your inbox sent items spam drafts or any other custom folders that you have created it'll download a copy to your email client and it will be synced to all of your other devices as well so guys I want to thank you for watching this video on how email works please subscribe and I will see you in the next video

Channel: PowerCert Animated Videos

Views: 29,157

Keywords: how email works, how does email work, imap vs pop3, dmarc, simple mail transfer protocol, smtp server, what is smtp

Id: ELioaGg4WOY

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024