Alpine Email Overview
E-mail is one of the Internet's oldest applications, and it's the most widely used. Internet users send hundreds of millions of e-mail messages to one another every day, and the majority of messages are business-related.
Sending Mail
When you send an e-mail message, your e-mail program connects to your Internet service provider's mail server. This is typically a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, the type of server responsible for sending e-mail.
Your message might be broken into smaller pieces, or packets, before it begins its journey. These smaller packets can travel more quickly from server to server and are reassembled when they reach their destination.
Sorting the Mail
In the same way that postal mail is sorted first by ZIP code, e-mail messages are sorted by domain. For the e-mail address support@alpineinternet.com, for example, the domain is the "alpineinternet.com" portion. The domain identifies the general direction that the message needs to go. As the email is red from left to right, the address is increasingly specific about it's target.
In other words, the entire internet knows how to find the mail system at alpineinternet.com. The mail server at alpineinternet.com is the only one that needs to know how to deliver mail to "support".
Filtering your Mail
Spam currently makes up two-thirds of all email received. This figure is astounding, and experts are predicting that the volume of spam will continue to increase. Spam is more than just an annoyance; it can clog mail servers and seriously damage productivity.
Alpine has partnered with one of the best in the business at filtering spam accurately, SpamSoap.
Reading Your Mail
Finally, mail must be read. Alpine provides instructions for configuring your email "client" -- a program such as Outlook or Thunderbird which downloads and stores all of your email. Alpine also provides a web-based email program for use for travelling, at home, or other specialized uses.
