An electronic mail (e-mail) facility allows users to send memos across an internet.
E-mail is one of the most widely used application services. Indeed, some users rely on
e-mail for normal business activities.
E-mail is also popular because it offers a fast, convenient method of transferring
information. E-mail accommodates small notes or large voluminous memos with a single mechanism. It should not surprise you to learn that more users send files with electronic mail than with file transfer protocols.
Mail delivery is a new concept because it differs fundamentally from other uses of
networks that we have discussed. In all our examples, network protocols send packets
directly to destinations, using timeout and retransmission for individual segments if no
acknowledgement returns. In the case of electronic mail, however, the system must
provide for instances when the remote machine is temporarily unreachable (e.g., because a network connection has failed). A sender does not want to wait for the remote machine to respond before continuing work, nor does the user want the transfer to abort
merely because the destination is temporarily unavailable.
To handle delayed delivery, mail systems use a technique known as spooling.
When the user sends a mail message, the system places a copy in its private storage
(spool?) area along with identification of the sender, recipient, destination machine, and
time of deposit. The system then initiates the transfer to the remote machine as a background activity, allowing the sender to proceed with other computational activities.
Figure 27.1 illustrates the concep. The background mail transfer process becomes a client. It first uses the domainname system to map the destination machine name to an IP address, and then attemptsto form a TCP connection to the mail server on the destination machine. If it succeeds,
the transfer process passes a copy of the message to the remote server, which stores the
copy in the remote system's spool area. Once the client and server agree that the copy
has been accepted and stored, the client removes the local copy. If it cannot form a
TCP connection or if the connection fails, the transfer process records the time delivery
was attempted and terminates. The background transfer process sweeps through the
spool area periodically, typically once every 30 minutes, checking for undelivered mail.
Whenever it finds a message or whenever a user deposits new outgoing mail, the background process attempts delivery. If it finds that a mail message cannot be delivered
after an extended time (e.g., 3 days), the mail software returns the message to the
sender.
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