For: Email Limited Electronic mail—often abbreviated as e-mail or email—is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use. A message at least consists of its content, an author address and one or more recipient addresses. The foundation for today's global Internet email service was created in the early Arpanet and was codified as a standard for encoding of messages, as RFC 733. An email sent in the early 1970s looked very similar to one sent on the Internet today. Conversion from Arpanet to Internet in the early 1980s produced the modern details of the current, core service, with transport provided by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982, and a revision of RFC 733 to be Internet Standard 11 (RFC 822). Multi-media content attachments were standardized in 1996 with RFC 2045 through RFC 2049, collectively called, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

Email systems that operate over a network-rather than being limited to a single, shared machine-are based on a store-and-forward model in which email computer server systems accept, forward, deliver or store messages on behalf of users, who only need to connect to the email infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message submission to, or retrieval from, their designated server. Rarely is email transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.

Spelling

The spellings e-mail and email are both common. Several prominent journalistic and technical style guides recommend e-mail,[http://www.apstylebook.com/ask_editor.php APStylebook.com ] and the spelling email is also recognized in many dictionaries. In the original RFC neither spelling is used; the service is referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1939.html RFC 1939 (rfc1939) - Post Office Protocol - Version 3 ][http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html RFC 3501 (rfc3501) - Internet Message Access Protocol - version 4rev1 ] The plural form "e-mails" (or emails) is also recognised.

Newer RFCs and IETF working groups require email for consistent capitalization, hyphenation, and spelling of terms. ARPAnet/DARPAnet users and early developers from Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and HotMail used eMail with the letter M capitalized. The authors of some of the original RFCs used eMail when giving their own addresses.

Donald Knuth considers the spelling "e-mail" to be archaic, and notes that it is more often spelled "email" in the UK. In some other European languages the word "email" is similar to the word "enamel".