Explain working of SMTP in mail

Explain working of SMTP in mail

Answer:-

SMTP:
▫ SMTP, defined in RFC 5321, is at the heart of Internet electronic mail. As mentioned above, SMTP transfers messages from senders’ mail servers to the recipients’ mail servers.
▫ SMTP is much older than HTTP
 To illustrate the basic operation of SMTP, let’s walk through a common scenario.

Suppose Alice wants to send Bob a simple ASCII message.

1. Alice invokes her user agent for e-mail, provides Bob’s e-mail address (for example, bob@someschool.edu ), composes a message, and instructs the user agent to send the message.
2. Alice’s user agent sends the message to her mail server, where it is placed in a message queue.
3. The client side of SMTP, running on Alice’s mail server, sees the message in the message queue. It opens a TCP connection to an SMTP server, running on Bob’s mail server.
4. After some initial SMTP handshaking, the SMTP client sends Alice’s message into the TCP connection.
5. At Bob’s mail server, the server side of SMTP receives the message. Bob’s mail server then places the message in Bob’s mailbox.
6. Bob invokes his user agent to read the message at his convenience.