TCP/IP E-mail Standards
The goal of TCP/IP is interoperability between systems
TCP/IP E-mail standards are divided into two groups:
- The first group defines the form of E-mail messages
- The other group defines the exchange of E-mail messages between hosts
An Internet E-mail address is of the form: <local-part@domain name>
E-mail gateways complicate addresses - there is no address standard for messages transferred through a gateway
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, RFC-821) is a standard protocol for transferring E-mail on top of TCP
RFC-822 defines a message format for text messages (ASCII)
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) defines the encoding of structured objects into ASCII