Alternative spellings

• email

Noun

Singular e-mail

Plural countable and uncountable; plural e-mails

e-mail (countable and uncountable; plural e-mails)

1. (uncountable) A system for transferring messages from one computer to another, usually via a network.

   He sent me his details via e-mail.

   The advent of e-mail has simultaneously brought our society closer together and farther apart.

2. (countable; see Usage notes below) A message sent via an e-mail system.

   I am searching through my old e-mails.

   He sent me several e-mails last week to that effect.

3. (uncountable; see Usage notes below) A quantity of e-mail messages.

   I am searching through my old e-mail.

   My inbox used to only allow 50 MB of e-mail at a time until last year, when they upgraded it to 2 GBs!

4. (informal) An e-mail address.

   What's your e-mail?

Electronic mail, often abbreviated as email, e.mail or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use. E-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the e-mail infrastructure, typically an e-mail server, with a network-enabled device (e.g., a personal computer) for the duration of message submission or retrieval. Originally, e-mail was always transmitted directly from one user's device to another's; nowadays this is rarely the case.

An electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field.

Originally a text-only communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, which were standardized in with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

The foundation for today's global Internet e-mail service was created in the early ARPANET and standards for encoding of messages were proposed as early as, for example, in 1973 (RFC 561). An e-mail sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from the ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current service.

Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is today carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separately from the message (headers and body) itself.