Psychology & Psychiatry

Set expectations to reduce email stress

People can limit the negative impact of email, not necessarily by sending less email, but by sending better emails that clearly define response expectations, according to a new study from the ILR School.

Vaccination

Targeted COVID-19 vaccine reminders boost uptake

(HealthDay)—An individual email nudge can increase COVID-19 vaccination registration among health care workers, according to a research letter published online July 28 in JAMA Network Open.

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Internal email reveals 65 virus cases among WHO Geneva staff

The World Health Organization has recorded 65 cases of the coronavirus among staff based at its headquarters, including five people who worked on the premises and were in contact with one another, an internal email obtained ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Phone calls create stronger bonds than text-based communications

After months of social distancing mandates, people are leaning heavily on technology for a sense of social connection. But new research from The University of Texas at Austin suggests people too often opt to send email or ...

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E-mail

Electronic mail, often abbreviated as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use. E-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems accept, forward, deliver and store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the e-mail infrastructure, typically an e-mail server, with a network-enabled device (e.g., a personal computer) for the duration of message submission or retrieval. Rarely is e-mail transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.

An electronic mail message consists of two components, the message header, and the message body, which is the email's content. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually additional information is added, such as a subject header field.

Originally a text-only communications medium, email is extended to carry multi-media content attachments, which were standardized in with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

The foundation for today's global Internet e-mail service was created in the early ARPANET and standards for encoding of messages were proposed as early as, for example, in 1973 (RFC 561). An e-mail sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from the ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current service.

Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is today carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separately from the message (headers and body) itself.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA