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E-mail is widely used E-mail is one of the most popular and useful Internet functions. With e-mail you have the ability to exchange messages with anyone who has Internet access, including people who use America Online and CompuServe. With e-mail you have the ability to type in a new message, reply to a message, send a file created in another program and send the same message to a group of people. Some benefits of e-mail are:
Speed - it can go from Australia to the USA in as little as 15 seconds. Cost - you are charged nothing for sending an e-mail message. Ease of use - you may use the same cut and paste facilities that are available in word processing packages when composing your e-mail messages. Flexibility - it is easy to send duplicates of your messages to other people or groups. Record keeping - messages sent and received can be easily stored for future reference.
How e-mail works To send an e-mail to someone you must have their e-mail address. The best way to get this address is to ask the person you are sending an e-mail to. An e-mail address consists of two parts, the username and the machine address. These two parts are separated by the "@" symbol. For example the address john@domain.com is a valid e-mail address, "john" is the alias and "domain.com" is the server's name. The alias that is used in an e-mail address is a string of characters that are determined by the system that the user has an account on. Once you have the mail message addressed correctly you can send your message. Email is passed from one machine to another until it finally reaches its destination which is determined by the domain name by using a store and forward service. Once you send your message it is sent to the mail server. The mail server determines the best route needed to reach the person you are sending mail to and passes the e-mail to their mail server. The e-mail is passed through any number of mail servers but it is eventually delivered to the final recipient's mail server. This system happens much faster than it took to read about it. Undeliverable mail
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This is a bounced e-mail message. The most common error messages are: 1. address. Make sure you have correctly specified the portion of the address before the "@". 2. of the "@" 3. Network unreachable What it means: Gateway limitations or problems with the network Host unknown What it means: Incorrect address in the domain or top-domain portions the address. Make sure you have correctly specified the portion of the address after User unknown What it means: Incorrect address in the username portion of the
backbone. Recheck e-mail address, retry another time. 4. Connection timed out Software problem communicating with the destination mail server. Check connection, verify e-mail configuration. 5. Connection Problem with the destination Contact administrator of the destination mail server. Standards to watch for: IMAP4 & LDAP IMAP4 Almost all of the Internet e-mail clients used the POP3 protocol to connect to mail servers and retrieve messages. However connection and download speeds were inferior. POP3 is an off-line protocol, any client using it will have to download messages from the server either at an ISP or on a company's LAN to the local harddisk and deletes them from the server before displaying them. IMAP4 (the newest protocol) can operate online, your folders and messages are stored on the server, not on your local harddisk. This speeds up download time. IMAP4 can also make delivery of email sent via modem a lot faster. If a message has a huge attachment that you do not need right away, you can choose to download it at a later
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refused server.
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time. Both the server as well as your mail client must support IMAP4 for it to work. Look for IMAP4 to become more common as interest for it grows. Both Netscape Messenger and MS Outlook Express support IMAP4 protocol. LDAP
Another recent development is LDAP. A protocol that stores directories of email addresses in a standard format rather than in the proprietary ones that mail programs usually employ. An LDAP directory can contain the email addresses of f.e. all employees. Public LDAP libraries are available on the web. LDAP is most suited for those using a LAN based internet mail server within their own organization. Sharing one corporate address book is much simpler than each user maintaining a separate one. While your company may currently use a system that locks you into using a specific mail client, it is likely that you will eventually be able to choose the email client that best fits your work habits. Both Netscape Messenger and MS Outlook Express support LDAP protocol. File attachments When you send someone an email message with a file attached (document, picture or zip archive) they may receive the message and the file. Or they receive garbage. The problem is that the internet's email standard is meant for sending text not files. Before a file can be mailed, it must be changed to something that looks like plain text on a PC. On the receiver's end the text has to be converted back into the original file. This requires that both sender and receiver have software that supports the same encoding standard. There are three common standards to contend with: UUencode, Base64 and Binhex. It is good to know what standards your email and your recipients can use. If you receive your email through a company LAN, you should ask the IS department. Try Base64 first (that's becoming the most popular standard) so you'll probably get through the first time. Internet Explorer can encode files using UUencode and Base64 (lets you pick the format your recipient's software can handle). Netscape programs only use Base64 attachments. If you receive a mass of meaningless characters at the end of an otherwise short and comprehensible message, it's the remains of a file attachment that your email program was unable to decode. To determine what standard was used, look for a statement just before the garbage - like 'Content-Transfer-Encoding: Base64', or 'begin 600
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picture.gif' (which signifies UUencoding), or 'Content-Type: application/macbinhex40; name="picture.gif" (Binxhex). If you find that you and your recipients don't have compatible email programs, change email program or use a third party encoder/decoder (WinZip, Wincode, XferPro). E-MAIL CLIENT PROGRAMS The first type of e-mail program you need is a basic e-mail client. Don't settle for the built-in program included with your Web browser. One of the essentials is a system of filters that will sort e-mail by keywords for you as it comes into your site. You can send out multiple e-mail messages to individuals in your e-mail program's contact file by creating a "group" or pasting multiple addresses into the To: field, but that's the mark of an amateur, since every one of the recipients see the e-mail addresses of all the other recipients, which can be embarrassing, and subjects your contacts to spamming from others. When pasted into the Cc: field, it works the same. But when you paste the e-mail addresses into the Bcc: field (which stands for "blind carbon copy") no one sees the addresses of the other recipients. If you have a small list of contacts to e-mail to, this works okay. But in a moment we'll describe some better tools for bulk e-mail.
Here are some of the best programs available! E-MAIL MERGE PROGRAMS A second type of e-mail software allows you to send out personalized messages to people in the database you've developed from your forms-to-email responses. They work similarly to the mail merge features built into Microsoft Word. You can specify database fields in the e-mail message, and the program will insert or merge the data from the database into each individual personalized message. Each of these programs runs on a Windows 95 desktop computer. The limiting factor in sending out a whole bunch of e-mail messages from your desktop is the speed of your connection to the Internet. Sending messages via a dial-up modem is relatively slow, and thousands of
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messages will take hours and perhaps bring you to the attention of your ISP. So if you plan to do a lot of this, you'll probably want to get a faster Internet connection: ISDN, DLS, T1, etc. LIST SERVERS E-mail merge programs run on your desktop, and depend upon the speed of your connection to the Internet. List server programs reside on web hosting service computers with a direct connection to the Internet, so they can pump e-mails rapidly. All include automatic subscribe and unsubscribe features, and allow a variety of lists such as newsletters and discussion lists, both moderated and not moderated. What is IMAP IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a mail server. IMAP was originally developed in 1986 at the Stanford University. It did not become mainstream until recently. Sunday, September 27, 2009IMAP has the ability to access messages from more than one computer without the need to transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers (unlike POP3). It's the aim of IMAP to be fully compatible with Internet messaging standards, e.g. MIME, allow message access and management from more than one computer, allow access without reliance on less efficient file access protocols, provide support for online, offline and even disconnected access modes, support for concurrent access to shared mailboxes, client software needs no knowledge about the server's file store format. The protocol includes operations for creating, deleting and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting and clearing flags, server-based RFC-822 and MIME parsing, searching and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof. IMAP resources
IMAP Connection IMAP4rev1 server Electronic Messaging Association
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Internet Mail Consortium IMAP server implementations IMAP utility source distribution IMAP Information Center Certificate Management and Installation with OpenSSL
IMAP server implementations
Server Name UW and version NAMESPACE 4 5 SCAN SORT THREAD
Cyrus 1.5.8 Alpha ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ OPTIMIZE-1 NAMESPACE 1 2 UNSELECT Kerberos V4
Supported Extensions
Authentication GSSAPI (Kerberos V5), LOGIN (SASL) Protection mechanisms
CharSets
US-ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 ... ISO-8859-9, ISO-2022-JP, ISO-2022-KR, ISO-2022-CN, US-ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-2022-JP-1, ISO-2022-JP-2, GB2312, ISO-8859-9, KOI8-R, IS CN-GB, BIG5, CN-BIG5, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, Shift_JIS, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, TIS-620 AOS, AIX, Altos SVR4, AmigaDOS, SUN-OS, Solaris, Linux, IRIX, SCO, SCO Open Server, VAX Ultrix, HP-UX, QNX 4, Pyramid, OSF/1, UnixWare, LynxOS, PTX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD, Data General DG/UX, EP/IX, Dynix, NEXTSTEP, Atari ST Mint, A/UX, Convex, Bull DPX/2 B.O.S., ICL RS/NX, MachTen, Windows NT Contact mrc@cac.washington.edu Digital Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, SunOS Contact
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Platforms
Contact
cyrus
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information Product is available ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z
Description at http://andrew2.andrew.c
Information author
Mark Crispin
Mark Crispin Based on N-PLEX server
? Windows NT, HP-UX Unix Digital, Netware, A trial) Contact For product description
IMAP4rev1 server
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The Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4rev1 (IMAP4rev1) allows a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server. IMAP4rev1 permits manipulation of remote message folders, called "mailboxes", in a way that is functionally equivalent to local mailboxes. IMAP4rev1 also provides the capability for an offline client to resynchronize with the server (see also [IMAPDISC]).
IMAP4rev1 includes operations for creating, deleting, and renaming mailboxes; checking for new messages; permanently removing messages; setting and clearing flags; [RFC-822] and [MIME-IMB] parsing; searching; and selective fetching of message attributes, texts, and portions thereof. Messages in IMAP4rev1 are accessed by the use of numbers. These numbers are either message sequence numbers or unique identifiers.
IMAP4rev1 supports a single server. A mechanism for accessing configuration information to support multiple IMAP4rev1 servers is discussed in [ACAP].
IMAP4rev1 does not specify a means of posting mail; this function is handled by a mail transfer protocol such as [SMTP].
IMAP4rev1 is designed to be upwards compatible from the [IMAP2] and unpublished IMAP2bis protocols. In the course of the evolution of IMAP4rev1, some aspects in the earlier protocol have become obsolete. Obsolete commands, responses, and data formats which an IMAP4rev1 implementation may encounter when used with an earlier implementation are described in [IMAP-OBSOLETE].
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