Understanding SMTP Email Server for Email Delivery
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SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the protocol behind the scenes that allows you to send and receive emails. This time, we will get to know SMTP Email servers and their functions.
Email plays a big role in how we communicate. So, what happens when we send an email?
The process of sending an email is similar to sending a physical letter, as it goes through a series of steps, and an organized system will handle the message and deliver it to the recipient. The SMTP server acts like the postman who sends the letter.
What does SMTP stand for?
Curious about the meaning of SMTP? Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the application used by email servers to send, receive, and deliver outgoing emails between the sender and receiver.
As the technology behind email communication, SMTP is the protocol that allows you to send and receive emails. Without SMTP, email communication wouldn’t function, as SMTP defines which server will receive your message.
A Brief History of SMTP
SMTP was built as a lightweight and easy-to-implement way to transfer plain text messages between devices. The original SMTP standard distinguished between the mail transfer agent (MTA) known as the server and the mail user agent (MUA), commonly referred to as the client.
The goal of SMTP was to provide a means for two MTAs to forward message traffic back and forth. The protocol does not specify any standards for storing messages, providing clients with access to them, or carrying complex content types like audio or image data.
The explanation above is simply a set of rules to move well-structured messages from point A to point B.
Email Evolution
As the Internet spread, businesses were allowed to connect to it, but they were informally prohibited from using it for commercial purposes.
Several large companies (especially IBM, DEC, and Control Data) built corporate email systems for large companies, and over time, smaller companies such as Novell, Lotus (now IBM Lotus), and Microsoft saw the business value in this.
Email systems began to build and introduce intra-company systems, expanding the email market.
None of these systems provided much interoperability, although after the SMTP standard was established, some vendors started adding SMTP support through gateways or connectors that connected MTAs from different vendors.
In the 1990s, SMTP gained interoperability to work reliably across multiple vendor MTAs, resulting in simpler and more robust solutions with several connectors, which led to the original SMTP gaining real momentum.
Today, SMTP is the de facto standard for transferring email between servers. Even products that once used proprietary protocols now rely on SMTP for message delivery.
What SMTP Does (and Doesn’t Do)
As indicated by the “T” in its name, SMTP is a transport protocol. All it does is move messages from point A to point B.
Like many other Internet protocols, SMTP is intended to be used over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Additionally, SMTP guarantees the delivery of messages to the destination address.
By using IP, we can rely on SMTP to deliver the contents of the message to the server, but what happens after that depends on the server.
Delivery, monitoring, tracking, authentication, and encryption are examples of services that SMTP does not necessarily provide, but they are still very valuable.
What is an Email Server, and What is an SMTP Server?
An outgoing email server is a general term used to describe the system that collects, processes, and serves email. Like a postal operator, every email message passes through the mail server before reaching its destination.
Without a server, you can only send emails to people whose addresses match your domain, like gmail.com.
Since SMTP email servers relate to outgoing email, they will have an address that can be set by the email client or application you use, commonly like smtp.serveraddress.com.
For example, the SMTP server used by Gmail is smtp.gmail.com. You can usually find the SMTP email server address in the account or settings section of your email client.
Using the store and forward process, SMTP works with email transfer agents to move your email across the network to the correct computer and inbox.
So, when you send an email using the Gmail or AOL SMTP host, the SMTP server will process your email, decide which server to send the message to, and forward the message to that email server.
Then, the recipient’s inbox provider, like Gmail or AOL, will download the message and place it in the recipient’s inbox.
You can find more details to help you understand what SMTP means in our documentation page. Common SMTP server providers and settings.
Is an SMTP Server the Same as a Regular Server?**
Like most servers, an SMTP server processes data sent to another server. However, it has a specific purpose for processing data related to the sending and delivery of email. SMTP servers do not necessarily reside on machines but can be applications that continue to run in anticipation of new email deliveries.
Why is SMTP Server Important?
When communicating via email, it is very important to send your email to the recipient securely and on time. Without an SMTP server, your email cannot reach its destination.
Once you press Send, the email turns into a series of codes that are sent to the SMTP server, which processes those codes to forward the message. Without an SMTP server to process the message, it won’t be translated.
Additionally, the SMTP server verifies that the outgoing email comes from an active account. In other words, the email server checks if the email account is active and functional for sending outgoing messages, protecting your inbox from unauthorized emails.
If the email cannot be delivered, SMTP ensures that the email is returned to the sender, notifying the sender that they have an incorrect email address or that the recipient’s email server has blocked the email for any reason.
That’s the article Understanding SMTP Email Server for Email Delivery that Mangcoding shared. Hopefully, this article is useful and provides new knowledge for you. If you have any constructive criticism or suggestions, feel free to comment or send via Email and Mangcoding’s Social Media.