What is Email?

Electronic mail or email is a method of sending and receiving messages from one computer to another. These messages can be pieces of text or graphics and can be sent even if the user at the other end is not online (not using his mail client). In this respect and mostly in all respects, electronic mail communication is very analogous to the letter writing system. In the postal system of sending and receiving letters, your letter is usually delivered in the mail box of the recipient even if she is not at home. Emailing also uses a similar electronic mail box, where mails sent and received are stored. One important difference here is that the email delivery is almost instantaneous.

Emails, earlier, were restricted to sending and receiving text messages, but off late various forms of graphics including pictures, videos and animations are being mailed. This, thanks to the development of fast internet connection technology, has become all the more convenient and is being used very commonly.

History of emailing:

Email originated much earlier than the Internet. Though, email as we know of it today, appears inseparable from the Internet, world’s first emails were simple messages which were put in the other user’s system at a place where she could find it when she logged on to her computer. The first usage of such email systems began in Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. Many computers then used to connect to a mainframe computer. The need of sending electronic messages was then felt across these computers connected to a mainframe computer.

As the inter-networking of computers increased a new system had to be devised to communicate across computers in a network. Ray Tomlinson, an ARPANET contractor, in 1972 invented the email addressing system as we know of today. He used the @ symbol from the standard keyboard to separate the user’s name from computer’s name and email addresses then took the form of name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer.

Things began to speed up after this and soon in a very limited span of time many more inventions made emailing very convenient and popular as well.