Will it be easy to check what’s being sent or, well, play with it a bit to your or recipient’s disadvantage? Likely too. Will it arrive intact to a receiver? Possibly. It’s like our postman boarded a public intercity bus, dropped a bag with mail on one of the seats and got off right away. The standard SMTP protocol comes with no security features, making it really vulnerable to hijacking and other forms of attacks. Given the importance and omnipresence of this protocol, you would think it’s heavily encrypted and secured with top-notch technologies from the secret Google or Yahoo! labs. When all the pleasantries are exchanged, the incoming mail is then delivered to the recipient, without the involvement of SMTP anymore but with separate IMAP/POP3 protocols.Īs you can see, SMTP takes care of a significant portion of each outgoing transmission. Another postman then picks up the package and takes it all the way to the recipient’s server where it’s picked up and stored for milliseconds at the recipient’s POP3/IMAP server. Think of SMTP as a digital postman that first, picks up your package (email) and takes it from your email client to the server, aptly named SMTP server (as it’s used solely for sending out messages). In simple words – it’s what gets your emails to the recipient within seconds, even if they’re currently chilling in the 142 bus at Stampede Trail in Alaska (LTE coverage might be a factor, though). Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the technology used by the vast majority of email clients to move messages between servers, on the way to the end-users. But if you want to make a more mindful decision or you’re just setting up your own client, it’s good to know what really happens under the hood. Luckily for all of us, nearly all email clients take care of encrypting our emails so you don’t have to worry about things like secure SMTP or SSL/TLS. But whatever you include in your emails, you definitely don’t want anyone but the receiver to see. What do you send in your emails? Pictures from your last trip or recipes for your kids? Business reports for your supervisor? Or maybe something even more confidential like login details or social security numbers? We’re not here to judge.
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