E-mail and E-mail Standards

E-mail functions include how e-mail works and its capabilities. a. Mailboxes. In an e-mail environment, the network administrator creates a mailbox for each user on the system. A mailbox is the delivery location for all incoming e-mail for a designated owner. b. Notification E-mail system can notify receipients when they have recived messages. The receiver?s computer uses sound, a visual cue, or a combination of sound and a visual cue to announce the arrival of new message. c. Return Receipt An e-mail program can inform a user whether or not a message they sent was received and read. Several e-mail standards commonly used today are: a. X.400 X.400 is designed to be bith hardware and software independent.  Some of the X.400 standards include: User Interface, Encoding Information, Conversion rules, Synatx and Access Protocols. The major parts of X.400 are: The User Agent, The Message Transfer Agent, and The Message Transfer System.

Network Introduction Network Cabling Wireless Network Network Interface Card OSI Model Protocols Ethernet - Network architecture Token Ring - Network architecture AppleTalk and ArcNet - Network architectures Repeaters, Bridges, Routers, and Gateways E-mail Standards Modem & Async Comm. T1, T3, and Switched 56 Digital Connectivities Packet-Switching Network,Frame Relay and ATM ISDN & FDDI

b. X.500

On a large or distributed network, locating a particular person, server, or peripheral such as printer can be frustrating. X.500 is the CCITT set of directory services developed to help users in distributed networks locate users on other networks to whom they want to send message. With this in mind, X.500 may provide a global directory of e-mail users. To do this, X.500 relies on hierarchical directory structure that uses agents to search for particular users or resources.

There are three pieces of information that X.500 uses to locate a particular resource:

1. Name services to locate a network name.
2. Electronic address books to identify a particular network address.
3. Directory services which contain centrally managed electronics network names and addresses to help users search on an inter-network basis.

SMTP was designed to transfer messages between two remote network computers. It is used on the Internet, in UNIX system, and is part of the TCP/IP protocol stack. SMTP works with other e-mail programs to provide both a client and a server function to send and receive e-mail message.

SMTP provides the control signals two computers use in communicating (hand-shaking) including: Connection verification, Message transmission, Sender identifi-cation, and Transmission parameters.

MHS is a de facto standard made popular by Novell®. It is similar to X.400 in that one computer on a network, the MHS server, translates messages between computers that may be using different e-mail systems. All products that are able to communicate with MHS servers can communicate with each other through e-mail.

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