Communicating on the Internet

Email Clients and Servers

Email uses client/server technology. If you have ever sent or received an email, then you have used an email client. An email client can be hardware or software based. The client is what allows you to preform tasks such as reading and sending emails, along with downloading attachments. Email client is what communicates with email servers, which are in charge of getting the email, where it is supposed to go.

How Email is Delivered over the Internet

The first step to delivering the email is that your email client connects to a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server for your email domain. This is telling the email where to go. the SMTP server then looks at the domain of the address that the email is being sent to and queries a Domain Name System (DNS) server, to ask for the IP address of the domain in a question. There are two types of incoming-mail servers, POP3 and IMP, the biggest difference between the two is that when you get an incoming email from a POP3 server, you download it from the server onto the computer. On IMP server, the email stays on the server until you delete it.

How Instant Messaging Works

Instant messaging also known as IM has been around since the early 1990's. I became an alternative to chat rooms, this still allowed people to chat over the Internet in real time. Using IM, you can send and receive files, create chat room, and send messages to and from a cell phone. To use IM, you will need to download the client software needed for whatever service you want to use. From there you make an account and log in. The client, when logged in will send your IP address to all your contacts that are online, from there you are free to IM whatever you want. Some of the popular IM's are AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Apple's iChat.