Maybe you have a business with offices in multiple locations, or maybe your family members are spread all over the world. How do you stay in touch without having to pay huge phone bills? Email is the answer. It’s no surprise that email has become the most popular service on the Internet.

Electronic mail or e-mail for short refers to the composition, transmission and reception of communications using electronic communication systems as a medium. Email was first used in 1965 as a method of communication between multiple users of a time-sharing host computer. Developed in the late 1960s, the ARPANET computer network is believed to have made a significant contribution to the development of electronic mail. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson pioneered the use of the @ symbol to separate the username and the network from it.

The postal van first picks up a letter you mail and sends it to the central sorting office. From here all letters are sent to the cities specified in the addresses. The letters received in each city are classified according to the individual areas of the city and then distributed. Similarly, all emails you send first travel to your Internet server provider’s mail server. From here they are sorted and travel through the Internet to the service provider’s mail server at the destination. Here they are stored in an electronic mailbox. When your friend logs on to the Internet, your email application, such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora, downloads emails sent by you from your mailbox to your computer.

The entire process can be completed in seconds, allowing you to quickly communicate with people at any time of the day. To receive email, you need to have an account on a mail server. This is like having a physical address where you receive the letters. The advantage it has over postal mail is that you can retrieve your messages from any computer anywhere by simply accessing your mailbox using an email client. Most mail servers are designed to work without the need for human intervention. They receive messages, store them, process them and transfer them.

Today, web-based email has become completely intertwined with business and personal communication. Using web-based email, you can access and send messages from anywhere in the world at any time of day.