El correo electrónico (en inglés: electronic mail, comúnmente abreviado e-mail o email) es un servicio de red que permite a los usuarios enviar y recibir mensajes (también denominados mensajes electrónicos o cartas digitales) mediante redes de comunicación electrónica. El término «correo electrónico» proviene de la analogía con el correo postal: ambos sirven para enviar y recibir mensajes, y se utilizan "buzones" intermedios (servidores de correo). Por medio del correo electrónico se puede enviar no solamente texto, sino todo tipo de archivos digitales, si bien suelen existir limitaciones al tamaño de los archivos adjuntos. Los sistemas de correo electrónico se basan en un modelo de almacenamiento y reenvío, de modo que no es necesario que ambos extremos se encuentren conectados simultáneamente. Para ello se emplea un servidor de correo, que hace las funciones de intermediario, guardando temporalmente los mensajes antes de enviarse a sus destinatarios. En Internet existen multitud de estos servidores, que incluyen a empresas, proveedores de servicios de internet y proveedores de correo tanto libres como de pago.

Leer el artículo completo en Wikipedia · CC-BY-SA

Electronic mail is a method of exchanging digital messages between computer users; Email first entered substantial use in the 1960s and by the 1970s had taken the form now recognised as email. Email operates across computer networks, which in the 2010s is primarily the Internet. Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly, typically to a mail server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. Originally an ASCII text-only communications medium, Internet email was extended by Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)to carry text in other character sets and multimedia content attachments. International email, with internationalized email addresses using UTF-8, has been standardized, but as of 2016 not widely adopted. The history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET, with standards for encoding email messages proposed as early as 1973 (). An email message sent in the early 1970s looks very similar to a basic text email sent today. Email played an important part in creating the Internet, and the conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. The ARPANET initially used extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to exchange network email, but this is now done with the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 () in 1982.

Leer el artículo completo en Wikipedia · CC-BY-SA