some questions about domain, internet and other

[ITlover]

I had some questions in my mind about how an e-mail travels from sender to the receipt.

about domain and how a person sends e-mail from internet to the LAN(domain environment).


Can anyone of you answer my questions. My questions are actually based on senarios.

[EzyStvy]

I'm sure someone can help - go ahead and ask away

In very simplistic/generic terms, emailing is similar to making a phone call. The sender uses a device to call a specific number/address and the receiver uses a device to receive the call/mail.

[ITlover]

well what i believe is that the telephone communication is similar to visiting a website because when we try to connect to a website, we need the ip address of that website just as we need telephone number of the person to connect to him and communicate with him.

If we donot know the telephone number of the department or company we wish to speak to ,then we look for their telephone number in Telephone Directory ,if we donot find it their then we contact the telephone operator and we get the telephone number from there.

Just as when we type the website address in the address bar of the browser and press enter, the computer checks its DNS cache and looks for the ip address of the domain of that website, if fails, then goes to the root level server and requests it.


Sorry for deviating from the main point, my question was about domains actually.

for example if their is a domain "Welcome .com" ,and it is a domain of an Institute .

When I'll send an e-mail to them, will the e-mail actually directly go to this domain or their is a lengthy process in it?

domain is a logical grouping of computer where resources are shared in secure way and the managment of those resources is centralized.

I hope my questions are clear,

Regards,

[mairving]

Simply it is all a matter of DNS lookups. When you send out an email it first looks up the DNS record for the domain. In that DNS record there is a part called MX record (MX = Mail Exchange). The MX record gives the server that is supposed to get the email. The assumption is that there is a mail server there and that it is listening for incoming requests to receive email. You can also have secondary MX records for redundancy. If you are retrieving email from that domain then you would have to authenticate before you can pull the email down. That's pretty basic and simple.

If you want to know more, try this:
How E-mail Works