Casestudy 3rdIA Mail Architecture
Casestudy 3rdIA Mail Architecture
Casestudy 3rdIA Mail Architecture
In this article we will discuss the Email Architecture, study the different
protocols like SMTP “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”, PoP3 “Post Office
Protocol”, and IMAP “Internet Mail Access Protocol”.
Email Architecture:
Email architecture consists of three components:
Sending Mail:
In order to send a mail, the user creates mail through the UA which looks
very similar to Postal Mail.
Receiving Mail:
The User agent, or a timer, is triggered by the User. Where a user has mail,
the UA will notify the user with a notice if the user is ready to read the mail,
a list will be shown in which each line includes a description of a particular
message’s mailbox information.
Addresses:
A mail handling system must use a system address with unique addresses
to deliver mails. Each user has a unique email address which is selected the
time a person sign up for an email ID.
Post Office Protocol version 3 “POP3” and Internet Mail Access Protocol
“IMAP”.
Commands:
Hello e.g. Electroniclinic.com
Send from e.g. [email protected]
Send to e.g. [email protected]
Data: e.g. “Hope you are fine” etc
Response:
Services Ready
User not local; the message will be forwarded
The command is not executed; mailbox unavailable etc.
Mail Transfer Phases: The process of transmitting a mail message takes
place in three phases: forming links, exchanging mail and terminating the
connections.
Connection Establishment:
The SMTP server begins the connection process once a client has made a
TCP link to the well-known port 25.
Mail Transfer:
Connection Termination:
Upon successful transmission of the packet, the connection is terminated b
y the client. This is a two-stage process.
Case I
Alice, the sender, uses a conventional mail server in the first case; Bob, the
recipient, has a Web based server account in it. Mail transfer is done via
SMTP from Alice’s browser to their mail server. The message being
transmitted from the sending mail server to the receiving mail server is still
via SMTP. Nonetheless, the message to Bob’s browser from the receiving
server (the web server) is done via HTTP. In other words, the HTTP is
typically used instead of using POP3 or IMAP4. If Bob wants to get his
emails recovered, he sends an HTTP request message to the website (for
example, Hotmail).The website sends a form for Bob to fill in, which
contains the user name and password. If the log-in name and password
match, the e-mail list is transferred in HTML format from the Web server
to Bob’s browser. Now Bob can browse through his received e-mails and
then can get his e-mails one by one using more HTTP transactions.
Case II:
Both Alice and Bob use Web servers in the second case but not exactly the
same server. Using HTTP transfers Alice sends the message to the Web
server. Alice sends an HTTP request message to its Web server using Bob’s
mailbox name and address as the URL. The Alice server passes the message
to the SMTP client and sends it via SMTP protocol to the server at the Bob
site. Bob receives the message using transactions running HTTP. The
communication from the server at the Alice site to the server at the Bob
site, however, also happens using SMTP protocol.