How Emails work

When you send an email to someone, there is a lot of processing involved in the backend, before the email reaches the recipient. A brief outline of the processes is explained below:

1. You compose and send an email from your email client.
2. The email client connects to the Outgoing SMTP server and handovers the email in MIME format.
3. The Outgoing SMTP validates the senderdetails and processes the message for sending and places it in Outgoing queue.
4. The SMTP server based on the domain details in the recipient address, looks up the DNS Server of the domain and retrieves the Recipient server information (MX records/ A Records in case no MX record is found) of the recipient domain.
5. Then the SMTP Server connects with the Recipient email server and sends the email through SMTP protocol.
6. The Recipient server, in turn, validates the recipient account and delivers the email to the user’s mail account.
7. The user views the received email using his email client.

Courtesy: Zoho.com