Definitions for teachers by teachers

Mail Server

At school, we have a separate mail server which services the whole district. The district supports Eudora in using the mail server.

For information on two widely used mail programs that are used to retrieve information from mail servers, click on the links below:

http://www.eudora.com/                                       http://www.microsoft.com/windows/oe/

by Cynthia Clark

Mail Server – A mail server is a term that refers either to a physical server (the actual computer itself) or the software that handles mail on a network or on the Internet. Most technical people refer to the software and hardware together without thinking anything of it. So when they say "mail server" they mean the entire unit.  In many cases a mail server (the physical server or computer) is dedicated to processing mail (called a dedicated server) – but often servers also do other tasks (called multi-processing). In a large organization like the University of Illinois or a large company there are multiple mail servers working together to manage and balance the load of e-mail. Viruses like the “LOVEBUG” virus that hit recently can really tax the resources of these servers, because they greatly increase the volume of e-mail. That's why you hear about people shutting down mail servers at these huge corporations...they're not only stopping the spread of the virus but may be shutting down because of performance problems. Beyond forwarding e-mail and storing e-mail, mail server software helps network administrators manage mailing lists for groups of users. A good example of this is the CTER2 mailing list.A network administrator has set up the CTER2 mailing list on a mail server.When you send an e-mail to that mailing list an e-mail goes to all CTER2 students.You must have an account on a mail server in order to retrieve your e-mail. Network administrators help set up those accounts, too!

Some popular examples of network-based software products that manage mail (these are software products) are Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange.Examples of Unix operating system-based mail servers (software programs) are Majordomo and Listserv.The word listserv has made its way into our jargon and is interchangeable with the word mailing list, much in the same way as xerox means a photocopy to some people.

Software programs include what are called “gateways” which act as translators and let differente-mail servers “talk” or communicate with one another…this is how mail flows from one system to another across the Internet despite the fact that there are vast differences in hardware and software.

A great and fairly simple explanation of how mail works on the Internet is at http://www.learnthenet.com/english/section/email.html.

So if you were to send me an e-mail (to amyfahey@uiuc.edu), how is it that I receive the e-mail here at the University of Illinois?This is the magic of the Internet, DNS and its MX records, and it’s a fairly complicated process. On the Internet, the Domain Naming Service (DNS) translates easy to remember names like aol.com, msn.com and uiuc.edu into network addresses, also called IP addresses (see a more complete definition of IP addresses below).

When your computer is set up by your network administrator to connect to the Internet, you also have a connection to a DNS somewhere.Think of the DNS as a huge phone book.As someone sending mail, I really don’t need to worry about where on the Internet uiuc.edu is, because DNS knows and it knows how to find my mail server. My mail gets routed to the appropriate server and I can use my username and password to retrieve it.

MX records within the DNS are like the individual entries in an address book. Just like in an address book, where you can look up John Brown and see his address, MX records are entries in the DNS to indicate which server on a particular domain (a domain is a name like uiuc.edu) is the mail server and which server accepts incoming mail (these types of servers are called MX Servers). There are lots of DNS servers all over the world.

by Amy Fahey

A Mail Server is similar to a phone company's "central office switch".  In the case of Internet mail, there are numerous mail servers, DNS (Domain Naming Service) servers, and routers that allow you to easily exchange mail with other Internet users. A mail server consists of four parts.

• An incoming SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) process, that accepts incoming SMTP connections (from mail clients or other mail servers) and puts the messages received into the message store
• An outgoing SMTP process that relays received mail addressed to accounts on other mail servers
• A POP process that allows a mail client program to retrieve messages from the message store
• A message store that is used to temporarily store messages received from the incoming SMTP process, before they are retrieved (at the request of a mail client) by the POP process

Relevance:  A mail server is important because it can store messages and forward messages for you.  You can also send mail to a large group of people at once.  For example, if I need to send an e-mail to every teacher at my school, I send it through a mail list instead of each individual teacher.

by Jennifer Haberkorn

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