Electronic mail (email) allows digital messages to be exchanged between an author and recipients. An email message consists of a header, body, and can include attachments. Email was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII text but now supports different character sets and attachments through standards like MIME. While initially used for personal communication, email was widely adopted by businesses for its simplicity and ability to solve communication logistics and synchronization issues. Potential problems with email include information overload, attachment size limits, spam, viruses, and privacy concerns.

2. INDEX
1. What is E – Mail.
2. Origin
3. Message Format
4. Message Body
5. Message Header
6. Header Fields
7. Types
8. Out of Business Use
9. Business Use
10. Problems
11. Acknowledgement
12. Bibliography

3. WHAT IS E - MAIL
Electronic mail, most commonly referred to
as email or e-mail since ca. 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 . Some early email systems required
that the author and the recipient both
be online at the same time, in common
with instant messaging. An Internet email
message consists of three components, the
message envelope, the message header ,and
the message body. Email servers accept,
forward, deliver, and store messages.

4. The first file sharing system was demonstrated in 1961
by the developers at MIT, where users could connect to
an IBM host computer through a dial up connection,
and then store and share files with other users who
would connect to that same host computer.
Fortunately, this incompatibility between various
systems was soon to become a thing of the past, with a
standardization of the email message format in the
early 1980s, with a header and message body becoming
the norm. From this system comes the identifiable
email system that we have today, allowing swift
exchanges of messages and content.

5. The Internet email message format is now defined
by RFC 5322, with multi-media content attachments
being defined in RFC 2045 through RFC 2049,
collectively called Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions or MIME. Internet email messages consist
of two major sections:
 Header – Structured into fields such as From, To, CC,
Subject, Date, and other information about the
email.
 Body – The basic content, as unstructured text;
sometimes containing a signature block at the end.
This is exactly the same as the body of a regular
letter.
The header is separated from the body by a blank
line. Message format consists of two things – Message
Header and Header Fields.

6. Email was originally designed for 7-bit ASCII. Most
email software is 8-bit clean but must assume it will
communicate with 7-bit servers and mail readers.
The MIME standard introduced character set
specifiers and two content transfer encodings to
enable transmission of non-ASCII data: quoted
printable for mostly 7 bit content with a few
characters outside that range and base64 for arbitrary
binary data. The 8BITMIME and BINARY extensions
were introduced to allow transmission of mail without
the need for these encodings, but many mail transport
agents still do not support them fully. In some
countries, several encoding schemes coexist; as the
result, by default, the message in a non-Latin alphabet
language appears in non-readable form (the only
exception is coincidence, when the sender and
receiver use the same encoding scheme). Therefore,
for international character sets, Unicode is growing in
popularity.

7. MESSAGE HEADER
Each message has exactly one header, which is
structured into fields. Each field has a name and a
value. RFC 5322 specifies the precise syntax. Informally,
each line of text in the header that begins with
a printable character begins a separate field. The field
name starts in the first character of the line and ends
before the separator character ":". The separator is then
followed by the field value (the "body" of the field). The
value is continued onto subsequent lines if those lines
have a space or tab as their first character. Field names
and values are restricted to 7-bit ASCII characters. Non-
ASCII values may be represented using MIME encoded
words.

8. HEADER FIELDS
Email header fields can be multi-line, and each
line should be at most 78 characters long and in
no event more than 998 characters long. Header
fields defined by RFC 5322 can only contain US-ASCII
characters; for encoding characters in other
sets, a syntax specified in RFC 2047 can be used.
The message header must include at least the
following fields – Message-ID, From , Date and
In-Reply-To . Common header fields for email
include – To Subject, Bcc, Cc, Content-Type,
Precedence , References ,Reply ,Sender and
Archived .

9. POP3 email services
IMAP email servers
MAPI email servers
Web-based email (webmail)
IMAP email servers MAPI email
servers

10. Email users attach a higher level of formality, in regards to other ICTs. Users
tended to associate the medium for communicating with professors, bosses,
and those who they maintained professional relationships with; the degree of
formality attached to email varies across users, so email is neither a more
formal or less formal ICT than others.
All users of email use the medium differently. With structural functionalism,
people will attach various meanings to influence how they use the medium.
For example, while one person might use email to communicate with their
friends or fellow students on a weekly basis, and another may use it to keep in
touch with family members on a daily basis. The situational setting (for
example, a student will find him or herself in a different situation than a stay at
home mom) in which the user finds himself or herself in shapes how and what
email will be used for.

11. Email was widely accepted by the
business community as the first broad
electronic communication medium and
was the first 'e-revolution' in business
communication. Email is very simple to
understand and like postal mail, email
solves two basic problems of
communication: logistics and
synchronization (see below).
LAN based email is also an emerging
form of usage for business. It not only
allows the business user to download
mail when offline, it also allows the small
business user to have multiple users'
email IDs with just one email connection.

12.  Information Overload
 Attachment Size Limitation
 Speed of Correspondence
 Spamming and Computer Viruses
 E-mail Spoofing
 E-mail Bombing
 Privacy Concerns
 Tracking of Sent E-mails

13. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to my
teacher Mr. Rajeev Sir as well as our principal Mrs. Indu
Dubey who gave me the golden opportunity to do this
wonderful project on the topic E-MAIL, which also helped
me in doing a lot of Research and I came to know about
many new things . I am really thankful to them.
Secondly I would also like to thank my parents and my
sister who helped me a lot in finishing this project within
the limited time.

14.  Wikipedia
 Britannica
 www.mail.com
 Huffington Post