Roaring Penguin Software provides an introductory overview to how e-mail works

Ottawa, ON -- (SBWire) -- 03/12/2010 -- Roaring Penguin Software Inc., makers of the acclaimed CanIt line of anti-spam solutions, announced that they have released a White Paper entitled, E-mail 101.

The concept of e-mail is almost as old as the Internet. The first e-mail programs were created for ARPANET in the late sixties / early seventies. E-mail was created in simpler times when everyone on the network was trustworthy. Even knowing what we know today with regards to spammers we still tend to take e-mail for granted and trust it far more than it deserves. This article takes a look at the components of the e-mail system. After reading it you will understand how e-mail moves on the Internet and how to interpret e-mail message headers. The Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and the Domain Name System (DNS) are covered in detail:

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is the protocol used to deliver email on the Internet. SMTP is quite old; it was first standardized in 1982 in RFC 821. SMPTP is the most prevalent protocol in e-mail delivery. It provides no authentication and any aspect of an email message can be spoofed.

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a distributed database for converting names to IP addresses. It uses caching to improve performance. There are different types of DNS records; two that control mail delivery are the Mail Exchange (MX) and Address (A) records. The MX record names hosts that will accept mail for a specific domain, and A records provide the IP addresses of named hosts.

About Roaring Penguin
Founded in 1999, Roaring Penguin Software Inc., specializes in e-mail filtering. The company focuses on fighting spam at the mail server, with the acclaimed CanIt and MIMEDefang product lines. Today, Roaring Penguin develops, deploys and supports its spam- and virus-fighting products for customers that include enterprises, ISPs, campuses, web hosts, and government offices. For more information, visit Roaring Penguin Software at http://www.roaringpenguin.com.