Saturday March 9-Sunday March 10, 2024

tessa's gone postal: CHAPTER 1 - e-mail
now playing: Rhys Chatham & Z'EV - selftitled
Carbon Sink - Climatic Paragon
Cluster - Curiosum
Bernhard Günter & Dorothea Krishnabhakdi - Reflection and Resonance

CHAPTER 1: e-mail

If you've ever used any command line shell, (which is probably almost all of you with an interest in *NIX) you have Glenda Schroeder to thank, since she implemented the first one, that which was used with Multics, the direct predecessor to UNIX. But also, if you've ever used e-mail (Who am I kidding, almost everyone who's used the internet more than once has <G>), you also have Glenda to thank for that, too, as she was an author of one of the an earliest research papers about how such a thing would exist, back in 1965, the same year Donald Davies started writing about packet switching, after earlier work by Paul Baran.

Here's the basics of how an e-mail between Betty and Veronica1 works, with gratuitous (but purposeful) use of many acronyms:
  1. Betty's MUA2 formats her message in the proper format and using a profile of SMTP3 sends the message content to her local MSA4, say smtp.cooperfamily.net.
  2. The MSA4 figures out the message's destination, say veronica.c.lodge@lodgeindustries.com, which is an FQDA5. In this case, veronica.c.lodge is the "local" part which is usually a username, here it is that of Veronica Cecilia Lodge. Then there is the @ separator (other protocols may use different separators). Lastly, there is the FDQN6, in this case, lodgeindustries.com. The MSA4 resolves the domain with that of the mail server of the FQDN6 in the DNS7
  3. The DNS7 server for lodgeindustries.com (probably something like ns.lodgeindustries.com) responds using MX (or mail exchanger) records listing the relevant servers (probably something like mx.lodgeindustries.com), an MTA8 server run by Veronica's internet service provider.
  4. smtp.cooperfamily.net sends the message to mx.lodgeindustries.com via SMTP3. If Cheryl Blossom, Archie Andrews, Reggie Mantle, Jughead Jones, or anyone else have been CC'd on the message, the server will need to forward copies to the other relevant MTAs8 before her message reaches the final MDA9.
  5. The MDA9 delivers it to Veronica (and anyone else).
  6. Veronica's MUA2 picks up Betty's message using POP310 and/or IMAP11.
The earliest e-mail program I remember seeing in my life was one my father used named after a famed short story author because of her story "Why I Live at the P.O." about someone living at the post office. These days, I think the most popular e-mail programs are Microsoft's Outlook, Apple Mail, and the Mozilla Foundation's Thunderbird. I think the first e-mail address I ever registered for myself (originally at the encouragement of my cousin) was through Microsoft's Hotmail. This would have been in the late 90s or very early 2000s and I can certainly remember seeing billboards for Hotmail, which certainly tells you a little something about my age.
  1. Let's buck tradition and use Betty & Veronica's names instead of Alice and Bob's, with apologies to Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman despite their contributions to cryptography and the usual names for our heroes and a thank you to Coyne, Silberkleit, and Goldwater for a ubiquitous source of entertainment in my childhood and its editor in chief Victor Gorelick, no relation to Kenny G. I'm going to leave out a political discussion which I could go on involving a rant about involving RSA, the NSA, and Ed Snowden, the litigious and censorious nature of the Comics Code, etc. Let's also assume that Betty and Veronica are computer literate enough to configure their own e-mail systems without the need for Dilton Doiley's help.

  2. Mail/Message User Agent is a program used to manage and access your e-mail. This isn't the exact same thing as an application you would use like Outlook or Thunderbird, but something they each employ for these functions.

  3. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an internet mail standard which lays out how e-mail is transmitted. There are other forms of electronic mail besides that which we call electronic mail and other standards used in tandem with SMTP in doing all this.

  4. Mail/Message Service Agent is a software agent or program that gets messages from the MUA (see above) and works with the MTA (see below) and MUA to help deliver them. Sometimes, MTAs do double duty, taking on the role of MTA as well, but there are some advantages of keeping each of these tasks more compartmentalized, which you can read about here on the Wikipedia page for the MSA.

  5. Fully Qualified Domain Address is the full version of an e-mail address, perhaps one you wouldn't ever see, since it also includes the FQDN. Note the difference between "foo@bar.com" and "foo@mail.bar.com"

  6. Fully Qualified Domain Name
    7. is something like "mail.myserver.org" as opposed to merely "myserver.org", which would be an example of what's known as a PQDN (yes, that stands for a partially qualified domain name).
  7. Domain Name System is way more complicated than I can summarize easily, but the best I can is that it's what connects URLs to IP addresses, i.e. tells your computer that by "lorem-ipsum.edu" you want to go to the website "123.456.789". DNS is often likened to a phonebook

  8. Mail/Message Transfer Agent is the software that brings the e-mail to and from its senders and recipients making use of SMTP, with a frontend usually found in the form of a client program like Mozilla Thunderbird or a webmail service like Microsoft's Hotmail. Sometimes called the mail relay host or similar.

  9. Mail/Messgage Delivery Agent is the part of the software that gets your mail to your inbox.

  10. Post Office Protocol, version 3 and Internet Message Access Protocol are the two most popular protocols in use with regards to e-mail today.


               O tessa o
          _\_   o
       \\/  o\ .
       //\___=
          ''


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