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A lot of designers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Gradually, View Details of entrances and routing systems linked a number of them. Many United States universities were part of the ARPANET (created in the late 1960s), which targeted at software application mobility between its systems. In 1971 the very first ARPANET network e-mail was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address.

For a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it promised that either an exclusive business system or the X. 400 email system, part of the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP), would predominate. However, once the final limitations on carrying industrial traffic over the Internet ended in 1995, a combination of elements made the present Internet suite of SMTP, POP3 and IMAP e-mail procedures the requirement.
The MUA formats the message in email format and utilizes the submission protocol, a profile of the Basic Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), to send the message material to the local mail submission agent (MSA), in this case The MSA identifies the destination address offered in the SMTP procedure (not from the message header) in this case, bob@b.
The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, frequently the username of the recipient, and the part after the @ indication is a domain. The MSA resolves a domain name to determine the completely certified domain of the mail server in the Domain Name System (DNS).

org (ns. b.org) responds with any MX records listing the mail exchange servers for that domain, in this case mx. b.org, a message transfer representative (MTA) server run by the recipient's ISP. smtp. a.org sends the message to mx. b.org utilizing SMTP. This server might require to forward the message to other MTAs before the message reaches the last message shipment representative (MDA).


Bob's MUA selects up the message using either the Post Office Protocol (POP3) or the Web Message Access Procedure (IMAP). In addition to this example, alternatives and complications exist in the e-mail system: Alice or Bob may use a client linked to a corporate email system, such as IBM Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.