What Happens to an Email After You Click "Send"?
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- Опубліковано 17 січ 2017
- Email is one of the most essential things to our life. But do you actually know what happens when you click the “send” button, and how it's sent to your friends?
Hosted by: Hank Green
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Sometimes after I click "send" on an email I have to call the I.T. department and tell them I forgot to put a stamp on it. They always say they'll take care of it. They're so nice to me. ^_^
Tim B. i never even saw this pic before. better question: why does everyone have YOUR profile picture?
***** It's just little ol' me. I comment on several science channels.
It's a unicursal hexagram if you feel like reading about it. Not much to read about though
+Master Therion
Do they often help you solve computer problems by 'turning it off and on'?
Bruce Dunn No, but yesterday they wanted me to send them a "screen capture" using "print screen." I tried putting the monitor on the copy machine but it didn't fit :(
I've always visualized email like in The Fairly Oddparents where Timmy rides a letter through cyberspace. You're telling me it doesn't work like that?
Jacob McCabe yes, Timmy delivers every e-mail and Tommy, his evil twin, delivers all spam.
Lol, it is close to that. Live in your Fairly odd parents dream. It makes more sense there.
I was a teaching assistant for several years for courses related to operating systems and networking so I had to explain this to my students many many times. And I still find it amazing to tell the story of an email. But I approve of your presentation in this video and I would like to thank you on behalf of IT people everywhere for doing it. Hope it is seen by as many people as possible.
I thought that one episode of the Fairly Oddparents made this answer quite clear...
Frankly, it didn't. It was made during a time when people honestly had no clue what computers and the Internet were even doing and the tech in question was just beginning to connect to people at an accelerating rate. I feel like they were just making fun of technology.
On the other hand, it's just downright hilarious, which probably matters more. (True story: when I was young, my brother and I made a story based on that episode where the main character was riding the email being sent the entire time.)
It was a joke.
immediately what i thought of when i read the title :D
William Stockhecker
Yeah, it *was*. Now that it's been thoroughly clubbed and skinned it can serve as a rug.
I was about to say this XD
1:57 -- Fun fact: in the IT world email has been jokingly compared to postcards rather than envelopes because of this. These days they now have encryption, but it has to be enabled on most servers. It's kinda like the comparison between http versus https, any man in the middle that can intercept the data in-transit can read it plain as day if it's not encrypted. Protip: be nice to your sysadmins, they have all of the access. All of it.
When he was saying "humans send ten times more emails than..." I expected him to finish that sentence with something like pigeons or voles.
I thought this episode was particularly awesome because I feel computer science is underrepresented on SciShow. I hope we get more CS content :)
SciShow really needs SciShow Tech.
Love the episode, waiting for more.
there are a few simplifications, but it's good to finally see a video that explains how this whole mess works. Nice work, Hank
Do they monetize their videos? I've never seen an ad on their channel.
Boozled i just watch an add...
if one has addblock one never has adds just saying
sansaction l XD alright
If everyone has adblock youtubers have nothing to eat. Just saying.
Riesenfriese I was just wondering since I've seen ads on other videos.
And at which point are they read by the NSA? :P
1:00 Stop telling me what I don't know Hank. You don't know me.
Yep. I actually downvoted this video just for that.
Honestly I braced myself before I clicked the video's thumbnail
*+nat4200*
Yup. I just clicked it to confirm I am indeed a 90s kid.
Sad.
I cleared my interview just because of you. Thank you very much for such an informative explanation.♥
Finally another video from Hank, loved it
What happens when you delete 30,000 emails?
Royal Penguins depends how many friends you have in high places.
Royal Penguins Probably the same thing that happens to someone when they post hundreds of racist/sexist and just plain insulting tweets.... nothing.
the difference is, you wouldn't find incriminating evidence in the e-mails... but you can on Trump's twitter!
Nothing. From a protocol standpoint, they are YOUR emails and it is your right to delete them. They are files taking up physical space on a hard drive you own, therefore it is your discretion that dictates whether the bits that comprise them are to stay in that configuration or not.
By the way, Penguin, stop being a useful idiot for the GOP's shameful witch hunt. It is not illegal to keep a personal email server (the DoD and DoJ just frown on it, but many government workers keep them). It is ONLY illegal if the server(s) in question becomes the source of a breach or unauthorized disclosure of classified data and Hillary's servers were NOT. She did absolutely nothing illegal (at least as far as the pathetic investigations into her servers is concerned).
Kynk Gaming sorry but you cant prove that there is nothing wrong with her emails but the main problem is the bribed, bias, or just plainly stupid any way non of us know the whole truth its all out of proportion.
That depends on your "intentions."
This was way more interesting than I thought it would be.
true
"You have no idea" Actually i work with it. So i do know. Very well actually
John Mertz not just dumbed down, flat out wrong in some respects. That's scary.
And did you notice they got it wrong? The SMTP->MTA->SMTP. Whu!? No, SciShow, the MTA is what does the final delivery. SMTP->SMTP->MTA.
Not just that, but the whole "pass to a server nearer" thing? Maybe in the Fidonet or UUCP days, but SMTP servers don't do anything like that for addresses they're not familiar with, they find the server with an MX query and send messages directly to the receiving server. While the ultimately delivery can be a multiple step process, that is only due to explicit configuration and not when a server doesn't know what to do.
(Okay, smart hosts are a bit of an exception -- BUT, they fall under "explicit configuration" as they're not really a required part of SMTP, but are used for other reasons).
And if we want to nitpick a bit, virtually all mail uses EHLO, HELO is not really used by much anymore. Even dumb SMTP notification systems mostly speak ESMTP and therefore use EHLO.
I loves me some SciShow, but if they get the fundamentals this wrong on a topic I understand (not just glossing over the ugly bits, but actually wrong), I wonder about their other research and presentation on topics where I'm not qualified to judge.
I must say that SciShow made a lot of things more confusing than they had to be.
They are doing videos on subjects were they know nothing.
So they do a little internet research and parrot it.
Great video and a big deal of information discussed.
It makes me happy to hear some Computer Science on SciShow :)
My emails go through the legend 27
I'm supposed to be replying to a Nigerian prince but this one DNS keeps kicking my ass.
Ganaram Inukshuk Is it thedns27?
+Ganaram Inukshuk
Drums man, u are supposed to answer to him using drums, not email.
Amazing how something so simple is actually stuffed with great technological innovations.
this was VERY interesting! Thank you!
As someone who has been sending and getting network email for nearly 50 years, and actually building and running the systems that do it for over 30 years, I'm glad to see such a well put together explanation aimed at the average viewer. You left out a lot of details (I have a complete presentation that tries to cover it in several days, but you don't have that time 🙂 ), but you did include a lot that often gets glossed over. I've actually dropped "how an Email happens" from my normal presentation conclusion and replaced it with "What happens when I click a link" as a slightly simpler case with fewer possible rabbit holes attached. I suggest you might consider doing that, you could include some of the simpler details that needed glossing over in this video.
good to see you again Hank :)
this is actually quite a good explanation of the process in a not totally technical way. rock on.
I highly appreciate the use of the word "initialism" where most people would incorrectly use "acronym".
I noticed that too.
I just finished the video and I'm still pretty convinced it is magic
The NSA vacuums it and copies it, then goes to the intended recipient.
Emails with sex photos gets passed around the intelligence apparatus. Illegal or depraved sex photos gets passed around congress and Senate. Copies of these are laid on Hoover's grave so he can look at it from heaven.
DeathToDrugUsers21 👌
This was super helpful for a class. thank you!!
Thanks for the information and analogy!
You say goodbye, I say hello.
So what you're saying is...
The internet really IS a series of tubes...
O_o
Aww, your hair looks great!
"A DNS", "the DNS"? No, no, no, no. DNS is a big, big system (and protocol). What you mean is 'nameserver', which is the part that people actually talk to.
*Edit:* it seems the person who challenged me has deleted their comment. I'm not just talking to myself. The original comment is below.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe the fact that my name is on RFCs related to DNS and I've spend the past decade of my life dealing with stuff around DNS and have contributed code to DNS daemons might possibly mean that I have half a clue what I'm talking about.
You have 'nameservers' or 'DNS servers'; both are perfectly fine terms. If you say 'a DNS' or 'the DNS', you look as if you don't have a clue. You can even say 'domain name server', but 'DNS' doesn't stand for that. It stands for the system and the protocol implemented by the system.
_Literally_ the last decade of my life has been me neck deep in DNS and the politics around it. I've breathed the same are as Paul Vixie. I've got drunk with some of the guys behind KnotDNS. I think at this point I should maybe know something.
I dont quite get what you mean. Is he wrong in the video? Not challenging you, just curious on how sending an email works.
+sarah It's not exactly "wrong", it's more like "not quite accurate". It's more accurate to say that "an SMTP server talks to a DNS server" (and one can optionally add "using the DNS protocol", though that last part is implied).
Saying that an SMTP server talks to "a DNS" is like saying that in order to pay taxes, a citizen "goes to the tax code". You don't go to the tax code, you "go to the tax collecting government agency's building" where you pay according to the tax code.
The real problem as I see it, the explanations didn't really explain anything. He didn't say "nameserver" but he also didn't say "lookup" (or anything similar) and really gave a very strange impression of name resolution's role in the process of sending an email. I've had to explain name resolution to people, and I've done so by saying that whereever a domain name is used to refer to a server or computer, it has to be looked up or resolved to a set of numbers called an IP address that a computer can use. Compare it to a phone book.
Who is Francis? Did you get his name wrong in a thread about getting the name of things wrong, for technology devoted to giving things a name?
When you send an "Email" it's send through your domain, to your email services, and then it gets sent to another, as if you're browsing the pages sending queries with you.
However, nothing else. But they always can be hacked without a password being needed. When you delete it, just know your hosting will have backups for months. But I host on my own :)
Thanks for the explanation Hank, I like your shirt.
Now I know how doctors feel when watching the physical health videos.
Grats on the haircut, Hank! :D
"What is an email?" asked the inconvenient child in the corner.
😱 Hanks back!!! Yay!
Excellent teaching sir
Wow! Amazing!
Thank you for this video- extremely helpful.
Had no idea how exhausted an email might be by the time it gets to me.
wow I literally just took my outlook certification today, what a coincidence
Hank's back!!!! Ayeee
And here I thought it just went through a series of tubes. :3
incredible !
thank you for educating the world about this a little more. all though the information is a bit in depth and could use more independent videos to clarify the details; this is a wonderful start. the more education we have about this sort of attack the better users of the internet are prepared. I work to help this effort every day so thank you truly.
"Humans send 10 times more emails than texts." Thats and interesting statement. Will the email to text ratio for non-humans be included in a future video? I can't wait to find out the stats for penguins and/or ottomans.
Pretty exact. However, private server communicate directly without intermediate "post offices", and most of the mail services today check the outgoing mail for spam and viruses as well, since senders may have an infected PC sending out spam on behalf of a botnet.
a handshake is always required.
Can you please do one on cerebral aneurysms? I had one rupture at 19 and would love to learn more!
Thanks for knowing what an initialism is and for using the term.
What happens to an email when it gets deleted? ;)
xxNATHANUKxx It goes straight to the NSA headquarters
xxNATHANUKxx Hillary Clinton has a mini orgasm
Stealth Gaming 😂😂
it get written over eventually, like when you delete a file from your computer, it gets overwritten
The "actual" email is a type of text file that resides in a tiny portion of one or more hard drives connected to your SMTP or Exchange server (typically a SAN or cloud solution) and like all files that get "deleted", the computer replaces the first byte in the file's data with a special character that tells the computer that the space taken up by that file may now be overwritten with data from another file if and when the disk gets written to again.
Next level
That first sentence is so true
Nothing like a good header.
Clear explanation!
It'd've been nice if y'all had done a primer prior to this explaining the basic functionality behind TCP/IP and the OSI model, to give a little more context for where email fits in that scheme. There's a lot that's kinda vague in this video, because the mechanisms that networking relies on aren't understood.
Would've been awesome if you had included some real visual representation of e.g. The header. I am always really curious how these technological files look
I used to go phishing in my local pond. Now my phishing hole is gone.
Protip: if you're not sure a link is legit, hover over it with your mouse, and in either the bottom left or bottom right of your screen it will show where that link will take you. Should work with any internet browser, probably a way to do it on mobile too, I just don't know how.
you guys should make a new channel called SciShow Technology
You had me at EHLO.
So... it all works thanks to magic :D.
It made me happy that he said "initialism" and not "acronym". There's something to be said about using the English language correctly, especially while watching a show that should be candy for the brain.
Is this whole video just a novel way of getting Hank's friend in Washington to reply to emails?
Instead of the subject of this video, I learnt something else today, I am bad at processing information just from speech.
I had to rewatch parts again and again to try and understand this video, it could be because the subject is complicated or that English is my second language, but I feel that if there were diagrams and pictures it would work much better.
They made this much more complicated than it needs to be.
When you type in a URL, some massive tables get looked up that returns a single, simple IP address. That's it. That's also why all URLs must be unique. If you knew the actual IP address off the top of your head, you could skip the whole URL part and type in the string of numbers to where you want to go.
When you send an email to a personA@url.com, it's nothing different than any other URL lookup. It finds the appropriate target, sends the info on its way. Once there, that server looks up it's own table to find 'personA' and it's now at its recipients fingertips.
So many abbreviations!
You forgot to mention that, anybody along the e-mail's path can read it and even change it, e-mails are like post cards.
What happens to an email after you click 'Delete'? My friend Hillary would like to know.
great video
IT professional here, few notes.
SMTP isn't the only email protocol, there's also IMAP and POP3, you're more likely to have the other two if you use an email address given to you by your ISP. This isn't much of an issue for the average person as SMTP, IMAP and POP3 get along fine. Where this does begin to become important is when you use an email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, the different protocols can provide a different experience to the end user which may or may not be what they personally want or are used to, these differences are largely to do with how the client interacts with the email server.
As for Domain Name Servers, they're referred to simply as Name Servers, if we called them Domain Name Servers then we get issues quickly because the acronym DNS is then the same as the acronym for Domain Name Services which are two different things which I won't go into in a UA-cam comment but any (and likely every) IT professional will tell you how frustrating Domain Name Services (DNS) are alone without adding the further complication of confusing DNS with DNS.
the mystery emails that make no sense, bin years since ive seen one but i was wondering wtf those was. TY for the info
damn i miss my Nigerian prince pen pal
I'm quite pleased I remembered most of this from the "Computer-Mediated Communications" class I took in the 90's, but I'm also a little disturbed that there's been almost no change since then. O.o
Now I have a song in my head about an email getting lost on a Mail Transfer Agent...
But does the email get a sandwich through a window?
Taking a guess. The message is transmitted via your internet connection to a central server hub and is then sent from the hub to the destination computer via an internet connection, where it's filtered and placed into the destination inbox.
good show . thank you. what happens to the i tune cards in the email you send to the person ????
Thank you Hiroka Matsushina for another great episode of "Bet you didn't know that one!".
The video implies that your email bounces between a lot of different servers, getting closer to the recipient each time. While this may have been true a couple decades ago, it's really not that true today. While there may be more than two servers involved, all those servers almost always either belong to the sender's or recipient's email service provider. There's usually just one transaction that bridges between the two systems (assuming the sender and recipient use different email providers).
That was a good video.
great video thank for your imfo
best video ever!!!!
Have you ever seen a new SciShow video pop up in your sub feed, look at it, then think, "Who cares?" Because that's what I'm feeling right now.
The way you discussed SMTP servers acts as if it is some cloud accessible from anywhere. It isn't. Your ISP email server would run one that is only visible or accessible from within their network, assuming that they are still running one at all because that's partially why they are obsolete. The only free webmail services offering SMTP are doing it for legacy support. Many charged a premium and tried to force you to use the web browser. So many emails are sent from mobile devices that wouldn't be able to send from an ISP's SMTP email server away from home that the alternative, IMAP, has almost completely taken over.
SpamAssassin plus teaching Bayes helped me a lot, it correctly marks a lot of the spam as spam and I don't think that I have gotten a false-positive in over 10000 emails yet.
What I find annoying is when I get bounce back spam that shows up in my inbox (spam attempted to forge as my address that get bounced back). There's always this worry at the back of my head that my email actually has been compromised and I don't know it.
Hillary Clinton should watch this fam
I thought the mail server opened a direct connection to the recipients smtp server after resolving the address in the mx record with dns. What situation bounces it around several mtas?
It happens when you have relays - servers may be setup to relay their mail through an ISP or some sort of relay (generally anti-phishing/spam/malware) provider. Then the MX record might point to a another ISP or relay company, or sometimes with in organizations they might have different servers handle different sections of the company.
Overall though this video is "loosely" right as to how it happens.
So I now know how Emails work. But how do BIG Online multiplayer games work?
funny story I just learned this last semester
@5:00 thats what got me to change email providers at one point. They were deleting the e-mails I had requested from a company. They never even got as far as the spam filter. and never made it to my account, ever. any e-mail sent by that company to me was just gone. To never be seen again.
You should do a video on England tech vs American tech
So the spam filters work based on a scoring system, each category (spelling, grammar, source) gets scored and added as a total based on criteria within each category. Then if the total score > baseline == malicious/spam
It's usually recieved by the recipient
"Oh, neat!" I said, clicking the video and looking forward to learning something... and then I remembered I'm an IT person thing and already know all this. Still neat though.
I have noting against the girl but you can see the experience in the way Hank explains things, makes you so excited to learn new things!
Not mentioned: The first MTA to receive your email from your mail client (either web-based or stand-alone client) usually delivers to the recipient's organization's MTA (usually its spam filter layer) on the FIRST attempt -- the notion that email goes through several different orgs is actually very rare.