Most people know how it works. You open a new email, put the intended recipient in the “To” field, put a subject, write the email and click on the “send” button. Nothing to it. Or is there more to know about it? Yes, and that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today.

There are two main ways of handling your email, depending on how it is accessed:

The first one is accessing it straight from the web. In this case, the term webmail applies; This is a web-based page that displays your emails, allows you to see, reply to, and compose new emails. Example: you go to yahoo.com, or msn.com, sign in, and thus gain access to your mailbox, right there on the web server that contains them.

The second one is… accessing it straight from the web. But wait, didn’t I just say that? Let me explain. The truth is, the second way could be said to be by using a program installed in your computer that downloads the emails to it and allows you to do the same as what you can do with webmail – see, reply to, compose new emails. Programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora, to name a few, are examples of the second way – These are called email clients. But the point is, and this is what I wanted to emphasize, all the email client does is access your mailbox in the web to download (receive) and uses the same mailbox to send emails from it. So in both cases, whether displaying a web page so you can see your email on the web or using a program that will access the same information on the web but will download it and then display it on your computer, the web-based email server is used.

So what use does all this information have to the average user?

First of all, it opens the door to understanding some of the “mysteries” related to email. Example: you’re talking to a friend on the phone and he/she says he/she just sent you an email. You use Outlook to receive your email. You check your inbox, but minutes go by and the email is not showing up. Finally, about half an hour later, the email shows up. Where was it all this damn time??? In your web server mailbox. Well then why didn’t you get it earlier? by default Outlook will do an automatic send/receive every 30 minutes. This default value can be changed, but if it hasn’t, that’s how long Outlook will wait between automatic send/receives. So if you don’t force a manual receive, the emails in your web-based mailbox are not going to download by themselves. At least not for up to 30 minutes.

So what exactly happens when emails get downloaded to your computer, whether by a scheduled email run, or by manually causing that to happen? 1) Your email client contacts the web server that contains your mailbox. 2) They say hello to each other, and the web server asks for credentials. 3) The email client must now provide the right username and password to the web server in order to gain access to the mailbox. Once that’s done, 3) The email client compares what’s in the web-based inbox with what’s in your computer email client’s inbox, and thus decides which if any emails are new and need to be downloaded. 4) It proceeds to download the individual emails (at which point you’ll see them appear in your email client inbox) and 5) Normally it will delete the emails from the web server’s inbox. This setting (whether or not to leave a copy in the server of what gets downloaded) can be changed, but that’s normally the behavior by default – deleting emails from the web server that have been downloaded to your computer.

There’s also an email protocol that will behave differently (it will keep in the web server’s mailbox whatever you keep in your local mailbox, and will delete in the web server whatever you delete in your local mailbox). But generally speaking, the aforementioned way is currently the most common one.