Exchange Mail Flow Flashcards
IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol
IMAP allows you to access your email wherever you are, from any device. When you read an email message using IMAP, you aren’t actually downloading or storing it on your computer; instead, you’re reading it from the email service. As a result, you can check your email from different devices, anywhere in the world: your phone, a computer, a friend’s computer.
IMAP only downloads a message when you click on it, and attachments aren’t automatically downloaded. This way you’re able to check your messages a lot more quickly than POP.
POP - Post Office Protocol
POP works by contacting your email service and downloading all of your new messages from it. Once they are downloaded onto your PC or Mac, they are deleted from the email service. This means that after the email is downloaded, it can only be accessed using the same computer. If you try to access your email from a different device, the messages that have been previously downloaded won’t be available to you.
Sent mail is stored locally on your PC or Mac, not on the email server.
A lot of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) give you email accounts that use POP.
Webmail accounts vs email apps
If you’ve used Gmail, Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, or iCloud, then you’ve used webmail. To get to your webmail account, you access the Internet and sign in to your email account.
If you have a PC or Mac, you’ve probably used a program like Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird to manage your email. Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird are email apps: programs that you install on your computer to manage your email. They interact with an email service such as Gmail or Outlook.com to receive and send email.
You can add any email account to your email app for it to manage your email. For example, you can add webmail accounts - Gmail, Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, AOL, and Yahoo - to the Outlook or Apple Mail app to manage your email, and you can add work email accounts.
SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
An SMTP server is used to send email. Though server is in the name, they do not necessarily reside on an entire machine. Rather, an SMTP server is an application that runs all the time awaiting new mail to send.
Email is sent using SMTP—Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. At its most basic, an SMTP server must speak this protocol. Modern SMTP servers must also consider methods for authenticating, such as DKIM and SPF. Authenticating email is one of the best ways to signal to receiving servers that the email you are sending is legitimate.
When sending large amounts of email, SMTP servers need to be able to react intelligently to response codes from receiving servers. Some email providers, such as Yahoo! Mail and AOL, will throttle the number of emails they allow through at a time. In that case, the servers return error codes to note temporary unavailability.
Throttling can pose a significant deliverability problem for applications sending transactional emails (emails triggered by a user’s interaction with a web application, such as password changes or purchase receipts). In these instances, a business or app is not relaying the vital information their users expect, because their SMTP servers cannot react to the error response codes. When this happens, email deliverability rates drop, affecting customer satisfaction and retention.
SendGrid wrote its own SMTP servers from scratch to efficiently send billions of emails per month. SendGrid customers all receive email authentication and SendGrid automatically reacts to throttling and other responses from receiving servers. For better deliverability, SendGrid automatically works with every email provider’s feedback loops to identify spam. SendGrid customers also have access to detailed analytics of all email sent through its SMTP servers.`
Domain name
A name that identifies one or more IP addresses. Domain names always have at least two parts that are separated by dots (for instance lsoft.com). The part on the left is the second-level domain (more specific), while the part on the right is the top-level domain (more general).
Domain Throttling
A technique that allows you to limit the number of email messages sent to a domain within a certain time frame. It is used to comply with ISPs and to avoid tripping spam filters. Many ISPs have their own policies and preferred limits.
DNS Lookup
A Forward DNS Lookup, or just DNS Lookup, is the process of looking up and translating a domain name into its corresponding IP address. This can be compared to a Reverse DNS Lookup, which is the process of looking up and translating an IP address into a domain name.
Fully Qualified Domain Name
A name consisting of both a host and a domain name. For example, www.lsoft.com is a fully qualified domain name. www is the host; lsoft is the second-level domain; and .com is the top-level domain.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
File Transfer Protocol – Used for uploading or downloading files to and from remote computer systems on a network using TCP/IP, such as the Internet.
Gateway
This is a hardware or software set-up that functions as a translator between two dissimilar protocols. A gateway can also be the term to describe any mechanism providing access to another system (e.g AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet).
Host
When a server acts as a host it means that other computers on the network do not have to download the software that this server carries. For instance, L-Soft offers the EASESM and ListPlex® products, which customers can use without having to store the software on their own computers.
Host Name
The name of a computer on the Internet (such as www.lsoft.com).
IMAP - Internet Message Access Protocol
A protocol used to retrieve email messages. Most email clients use either the IMAP or the POP protocol.
IP (Internet Protocol) address
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique identifier for a computer on the Internet. It is written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number can range from 0 to 255. Before connecting to a computer over the Internet, a Domain Name Server translates the domain name into its corresponding IP address.
ODBC: Open DataBase Connectivity
A Microsoft standard for accessing different database systems from Windows, for instance Oracle or SQL.
