Mail Transfer Agents and The
Autoresponder
An
autoresponder is a computer programme that automatically answers any e-mails that are
sent to it. They can be either extremely simple or indeed quite complex.
The first
autoresponder was establishted by way of mail transfer agents. Such
devices
found they were unable to deliver an e-mail to a particular address.
The result
of this failure to deliver was the creation of bounce messages, such as
"it was not possible to deliver your email because..." type responses.
The internet's
uses a standard e-mail protocol called SMTP (or Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol which is designated as the Internet
standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet
Protocol
(IP) networks). A bounce
message
takes the form of an automated email message from a mail system. The
nature of
the message is to inform the sender that there is another message
concerning a
problem related to the delivery of their message. In this way, the
original
message is said to have bounced.
Today’s autoresponder
needs to pay particular attention to
the avoidance of generating e-mail backscatter. By not avoiding this
simple
precaution, the autoresponser itself may be regarded as just another
form of E-mail
spam.
Email
spam, viruses and worms represent damaging outcomes
related to backscatter. It is caused by e-mail servers receiving spam
and other
mail. As a result of this, bounce messages are sent to innocent third
parties.
The cause of this is that the original message envelope sender is
forged to contain
the usually unprotected e-mail address of the victim. In nearly all
cases, such
e-mails are dispatched with a forged From: header, almost identical to
the
envelope of the sender.
A
mail transfer agent (MTA), also known as a message
transfer agent, is in fact a computer process whereby electronic mail
messages
are transferred from one computer to another in the form of single hop
application-level transactions. An MTA is handles the client (who is
sending
the message) as well as the server (which is at the receiving end)
elements of
the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
Mail
is transferred from one MTA to another, and the details
involved in the transmission are notified by the SMTP. On those
occasions when
the recipient of a given message is not hosted locally, the message is
forwarded to another MTA. Whenever an MTA receives an email message, it
automatically adds a Received trace header field to the top of the
headers of
the message. In this way, there is an established build-up of
sequential records
of MTAs handling that particular message.
The MTA
continues working in the background, whereas the
user normally interacts by way of a mail user agent, or MUA (which is a
computer program for the purpose of managing emails). For message
recipients that
are hosted locally, the message delivery agent, or MDA, is responsible
for
ensuring that the email is delivered to the recipient’s mailbox. The
MDA is
computer programme that transfers the responsibility for the management
of
e-mail messages from the MTA within the message handling service, or
MHS, to a
recipient's environment, most notably transferring them into a mailbox.
In this
way, the message handling segment of the message delivery agent (MDA)
receives
the message from the MTA. Once the delivery of the message has been
finalised,
the Return-Path field is added to the envelope to record the return
path.
Autoresponders
– How To Succeed
Peter Radford writes Articles with Websites on a
wide range of subjects. Autoresponder
Articles cover Description, Application, Types, Software, Squeeze Pages.
His Website
contains over 60 Autoresponder Articles,
written by others and carefully selected.
View his Website at:
autoresponders-how-to-succeed.com
Presented on 6/9/10. This Article may be reprinted so long as the
Resource Box remains in tact.
| 