Email is not a difficult mechanism to understand. Any business owner writes numerous emails in an average day. The SEND button is clicked and the email arrives at its destination. What follows is a brief discussion of what happens in the nearly instantaneous electronic time between.
Imagine composing an email and clicking send. After this, the program being used to compose the email reformats it in a way that the Internet can understand. It includes a lot of information in the header that most users never see. The program then ships the email off to the server using the SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which was discussed in the definitions section above.
The server looks at the email and decides where it should go. The email address shows the local user before the @ symbol, and after shows the domain, or the more general location for delivery. A few other things happen in the server at this point as well. The domain name is translated to a number through the Domain Name Server or DNS, and the delivery information is cross-referenced with the MX record to be sure of the delivery location.
The email is sent to the server at the correct address, where it waits for the recipient to open his email program and log into the server. After this, the server moves the email from its storage to the client computer and it can finally be read.
With all of this said, there are many variations that can affect this description. This is the way email is transferred in the majority of instances, though an individual business's case may be different.
One thing to consider is whether this is an inter-office email or an intra-office email. If, for example, you are only sending the email down the hall, it’s possible that your company's own email server would handle the entire transaction and the email would never be reformatted for receipt by another type of email server. It may happen instantaneously and in-house. If this is desirable for some reason specific to your business, outsourcing your email will change this dynamic, and so it's something that should be closely considered.
Another thing which would change the dynamic and which should be considered when contemplating outsourcing, is the shift to web mail from your standard email clients (such as Outlook Express or Eudora). Shifting to web mail will create a different workflow for the email transfer.
