Email Protocols:

Understanding SMTP,
IMAP, MIME, Message
Transfer Agent, and
User Agent

Learn about the essential email protocols used for efficient communication. Dive
into the world of SMTP, IMAP,POP,MIME, Message Transfer Agent, and User
Agent.
SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
The standard mechanism for electronic mail in the Internet is Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP). It provides mail and message exchange between TCP/IP hosts.
SMTP is based on end-to-end delivery i.e., an SMTP client contacts the destination
host’s SMTP server directly for delivering the mail. The destination host’s SMTP
server keeps the mail until the mail has been successfully copied into the recipient’s SMTP. The SMTP
is a connection service based on client-server environment and runs on port number 25 at the server side
as shown in the Figure 8.
The various components of SMTP are:

1)Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)

2)User Agent (UA)
SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
1 Efficient Email 2 Secure Mail 3 Relay and Routing
Delivery Exchange
Uncover the process of
SMTP enables the smooth SMTP ensures the relaying and routing
transmission of emails confidentiality and emails, and SMTP
across different networks, integrity of your emails facilitates the exchange of
ensuring reliable delivery through encryption and messages between mail
to recipients. authentication servers.
mechanisms.
Message Transfer Agent: The
Email Courier
The transfer of messages i.e., mails is delivered through an agent known as Message Transfer Agent
(MTA). MTAs assist a user in sending as well as receiving the messages. The MTA consists of two
shades i.e., MTA client for sending the mail while MTA server for listening/receiving the mails as
shown in Figure10. The MTA is generic and defines how the commands and responses should be sent
back and forth. A popular example of MTA in UNIX is known as sendmail
Message Transfer Agent: The
Email Courier
1 Email Routing

Message Transfer Agent acts as an electronic courier, relaying emails from the sender's mail
server to the recipient's server.

2 Spam and Virus Filtering

Message Transfer Agents play a crucial role in identifying and filtering unsolicited emails,
protecting users from spam and malware.

3 Distributed Email Delivery

Message Transfer Agents enable reliable email delivery by employing various techniques,
including multiple server hops and fallback mechanisms.
User Agent: The Email Interface
The user agent mainly deals with the composition of messages. The user agent
provides an interface in the form as shown in Figure 10 wherein s/he can write the
message, specify the destination address (that is create an envelope). Therefore, UA
puts the message into the envelope. The various services offered by the user agent are
as under:

1) Reading the received messages

2) Replying to the read messages
3) Composing the messages
4) Forwarding the messages
5) Handling the various mailbox settings
User Agent: The Email Interface

Email Client Interface Mobile Email Apps Webmail Services

User Agents, the email client User Agents extend to mobile Learn about the convenience of
applications that provide us with devices, offering feature-rich User Agents in the form of web-
intuitive interfaces for reading, applications for accessing and based email services, enabling
composing, and managing our managing emails on the go. access to emails through a
emails. standard web browser.
Post Office Protocol (POP)
As SMTP is based on TCP/IP protocol, a TCP connection is required to be
established between both ends. However, user machines cannot be expected to be
online 24 x 7, especially a desktop machine owned by a home user. Therefore, there
was a need for developing a system by which a user could receive his/her e-mails
even though the machine was powered off. Therefore, most of the organisations
install a SMTP server which is always online and receives e-mails on the behalf of
each and every user of the organisation on its network. Basically the SMTP server
acts as a “post office”.
In order to retrieve the e-mails stored in the SMTP server on the behalf of the users, a
protocol called Post Office Protocol (POP) has been devised. It assists in
downloading the e-mails from the SMTP server as shown in Figure 11.
IMAP: Internet Message Access
Protocol
In POP, whenever a user accesses the mails from the mail server, i.e., downloads the mails,
instantantly those accessed mails are deleted from the mail server. Thus, POP is not suitable for
people accessing their mails from various locations, i.e., cyber cafe, home, hotel etc. POP does not
provide the facility for creating folders, organising the
mails on the mail server etc.

In order to avoid the deletion of the mails from the mail server, another protocol called Internet
Mail Access Protocol (IMAP) has been devised. In addition to services offered by POP, IMAP
provides the following services:

1) The user can create, rename or delete the mailbox on the mail server.
2) The user can check the header part of the mail before downloading the message
IMAP: Internet Message Access
Protocol
1 Remote Access

IMAP allows users to access their emails from anywhere, supporting synchronization and
managing messages on multiple devices.

2 Folder Organization

IMAP empowers users to efficiently organize their email folders, making it easier to find
and manage their messages.

3 Offline Access

IMAP provides offline access to emails, ensuring users can read and compose messages
even without an active internet connection.
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions
The SMTP protocol sends the mails i.e., the messages only in a Network Virtual
Terminal seven-bit ASCII format. That is, it will support only those languages that
can be represented by a seven-bit ASCII format. Therefore, messages written in
languages such as German, Russian and French cannot be sent through SMTP.
Moreover, SMTP does not support the transfer of video files, audio files and binary
files. Thus, there was a need for developing a mechanism for allowing the transfer of
incompliant formats

A protocol called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) supports transfer of

Non-ASCII formats through SMTP. Primarily, MIME converts the non-ASCII
formats into ASCII format and passes the data to SMTP. Consequently, the SMTP
sends the ASCII form of data to the destination machine. The SMTP service at the
destination machine passes the ASCII form of data to MIME which in turn converts
the data into non-ASCII format as shown in Figure 12. Remember that MIME is
simply an extension of SMTP and is not a mail protocol.
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions
MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions
MIME defines five headers which can be supplemented with the original SMTP
header in order to define the following parameters:

• MIME Version:
It defines the version of MIME being used. The current version of MIME is 1.1
• Content -Type:
It defines the type of data used in the body of the message, e.g.,
text, image, video, audio, postscript etc.
• Content Transfer-Encoding:
It defines the method to encode the mail message
into 0’s and 1’s. The various kinds of encoding techniques are as follows:
ASCII-7 bit, Non-ASCII-8 bit, Non-ASCII-Binary, Non-ASCII-Base64 and Non-ASCII-
Quoted-printable.
• Content-id:
It identifies the complete message in a multiple-message scenario
• Content-Description:
It describes whether the body of the message is text,image, video audio etc.
Conclusion: Mastering Email
Communication
1 Efficiency

Understand the role of each protocol, allowing you to optimize your email experience and
streamline your communication workflow.

2 Security

Appreciate the privacy and security measures offered by these protocols, ensuring the
confidentiality and integrity of your sensitive information.

3 Connectivity

Realize the seamless connection established by these protocols, allowing you to stay
connected with colleagues, friends, and family across the globe.