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In its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from one computer to another. You can send or receive personal and business-related messages with attachments, such as pictures or formatted documents. You can even send music and computer programs.
Given the revolutionary effect that e-mail has had on the way people communicate the world over, one might expect the first e-mail message to have been similarly memorable. But Ray Tomlinson, the computer engineer who first discovered the means to send a message from one computer to another across a network, clearly had other things on his mind.
At the time, he was working for Cambridge, Mass.-based BBN Technologies, the company that developed ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. Tomlinson was working on a program called SNDMSG (send message) that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for one another—sort of a single-computer version of an e-mail system. At the same time he was testing a file transfer program (CYPNET) that would allow users to send files to remote computers linked to ARPANET. It occurred to Tomlinson that if he melded SNDMSG and CYPNET together it would be possible to send messages to other mailboxes on the network as easily as sending files.
One of the decisions that Tomlinson had to make as he experimented with e-mail was how to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn't occur naturally in people's names and that wasn't a digit. The designation for mailboxes on remote computers that he came up with was the now ubiquitous @ symbol. "It designates a place, and it's the only preposition on the keyboard," he points out. Though it turned out to be a decision with far-reaching impact, at the time Tomlinson gave it only "30 to 40 seconds of thought."
The standard protocol used for sending email over the internet is called SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is used to send emails, but is not involved in the reading and receiving side of the process. The most common way of reading emails is by using POP (or Post Office Protocol) servers. When you send an email, your computer forwards it to your SMTP server, which checks the destination email address, and then re-routes it on to the recipient's mail server. This message will then sit in the mailbox on the destination mail server, until the recipient checks their email.
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