The history of Email starts back in the early year of 1965.  Email back then was used the same way it is today , to communicate.Although this communication was not as wide spread as it is today , and was only available to a select few such as ; government officials such as the president and by air force pilots.As time went by the use of Email became more popular and wide spread as with any new piece of technology. Although Email is starting to show its age and is becoming surpassed by the Instant message. Contrary to many beliefs Email is not instant. It has to go through a big process where instant messaging just sends messages back and forth.

When sending an Email you first compose a message using your Mail User Agent (MUA). To put it simply the MUA is what you use to make your message. Now this can be a range of different tools from outlook express to the compose feature on yahoo mail . After you hit send your MUA formats your Email into Internet Email Format and uses the ” simple mail transfer protocol ” (SMTP) to send your message to the mail transfer agent(MTA). When it does this it simply means that it's sending your message to the server that actually sends out your messages. For example this would be the yahoo mail server .The MTA Then looks at the Email address that you supplied and looks where to send it. For example if you wanted to send an Email address to User@Microsoft.com then the MTA would look at the domain name which in this case is Microsoft.com and then they look at the user name which in this case is user .The Email is then directed to the Mx record listing .The Mx record listing is there to tell the Email how it should be routed. Basically what this means is that the Mx record listing is there to give directions to the Email so that it can deliver the Email to the correct user.And that is how an Email is sent.

As always with such great gains as super fast communication there come some risks with Email to. Ever since Email has become wide spread there have always been the risk of viruses being attached to Emails.Although most mail systems have integrated virus scans , there is still a risk . As with any technology the Email will soon be a thing of the past as mankind moves on to faster things.