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Computer Science – Electronic Mail {E-mail}

Computer Science JSS2

Week 5

Topic: E-MAIL (Electronic Mail)

E-MAIL (Electronic Mail)

Electronic mails enable us to exchange message with people around the world, including friends, family members, colleagues, customers and even people you meet on the internet. E-mail is an exciting feature of the internet as we can send and receive message over long distance. Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail since 1993, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. It is also fast, easy and inexpensive.

PARTS OF E-MAIL

An e-mail address is the combination of a users name and domain name that identifies the user so that he/she can receive messages.

An email message has the several parts like form, to CC, BCC and subject.

  1. The person who is sending the email message writes his or her email address in this address section.
  2. To the email address of the person who receives the message is been sent is written where
  3. CC stands for carbon copy it is exact copy the message
  4. BCC stands for blind carbon copy if you want to send the same message to several people, without them knowing that other has also received the same message, you can type the address
  5. Subjects is what known as a very short descriptions of your message is written in these section.

HEADER FIELDS OF E-MAIL

Common header fields for email include:

  • To: The email address(es), and optionally name(s) of the message’s recipient(s). Indicates primary recipients (multiple allowed), for secondary recipients see Cc: and Bcc: below.
  • Subject: A brief summary of the topic of the message. Certain abbreviations are commonly used in the subject, including “RE:” and “FW:”.
  • Bcc: Blind carbon copy; addresses added to the delivery list but not (usually) listed in the message data, remaining invisible to other recipients.
  • Cc: Carbon copy; Many email clients will mark email in one’s inbox differently depending on whether they are in the To: or Cc: list.
  • Content-Type: Information about how the message is to be displayed.
  • Precedence: commonly with values “bulk”, “junk”, or “list”; used to indicate that automated “vacation” or “out of office” responses should not be returned for this mail, e.g. to prevent vacation notices from being sent to all other subscribers of a mailing list. Sent mail uses this header to affect prioritization of queued email, with “Precedence: special-delivery” messages delivered sooner. Microsoft Exchange respects a fine-grained automatic response suppression mechanism, the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header.
  • References: Message-ID of the message that this is a reply to, and the message-ID of the message the previous reply was a reply to, etc.
  • Reply-To: Address that should be used to reply to the message.
  • Sender: Address of the actual sender acting on behalf of the author listed in the From: field (secretary, list manager, etc.).
  • Archived-At: A direct link to the archived form of an individual email message.

SPAMMING AND COMPUTER VIRUSES

The usefulness of email is being threatened by four phenomena: email bombardment, spamming, phishing, and email worms.

Spamming is unsolicited commercial (or bulk) email. Because of the minuscule cost of sending email, spammers can send millions of email messages each day over an inexpensive Internet connection. Hundreds of active spammers sending this volume of mail results in information overload for many computer users who receive lots of mails each day.

Email Worms use email as a way of replicating themselves into vulnerable computers. Although the first email worm affected UNIX computers, the problem is most common today on the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The combination of spam and worm programs result in users receiving a constant drizzle of junk email, which reduces the usefulness of email as a practical tool.

EMAIL SPOOFING

Email spoofing occurs when the email message header is designed to make the message appear to come from a known or trusted source. Email spam and phishing methods typically use spoofing to mislead the recipient about the true message origin.

EMAIL BOMBING

Email bombing is the intentional sending of large volumes of messages to a target address. The overloading of the target email address can render it unusable and can even cause the mail server to crash.

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