How an Email works.

The basic way an Email works is that it's a text file being sent over the internet to another computer, the way people do this is they download a web client for example, Hotmail, and this provides an easy and organised way of managing and sending emails.
Once you have an Email client on your computer you are ready to send Emails, the way it works is
that the Email client has to connect to an Email server, the email server recieves the email and sends it to the recipient. Millions of Emails are sent this way every day. The real e-mail system consists of two different servers running on a server machine. One is called the SMTP server, where SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The SMTP server handles outgoing mail. The other is either a POP3 server or an IMAP server, both of which handle incoming mail. POP stands for Post Office Protocol, and IMAP stands for Internet Mail Access Protocol. Simplefied; the email is first sent from the sender's computer, or more specifically, the email client on the website the user is on, to the sender's Email server, from the sender's Email server it is then sent to the recipients Email server, the server will filter the email for junk and then store it in their database so it can be retrieved later, the recipient's email client will then download the email from the server and display it to the recipient.

An example of an Email client.