Difference Between Regular Mail and Electronic Mail?

Difference between E-mail and Regular Mail

In my Article Why the AntiSpam don’t block all Spam? I explained a little bit about emails and that there’s no real difference between Electronic Emails and Regular Mail other than the “e”. I will explain in more detail what I mean.

Regular Mail

Let’s start with the simple one and the one you were used to know before e-mail got invented. For mail to get deliver you always need a Sender, a Carrier and a Recipient. I think you are smart enough to understand each term and who is who. Now let’s visualize this mail process:

You have the Sender that wants to send you a letter to your home. It could be your children, family, bank, etc. Then you have the carrier which is the device, vehicle or person that will deliver the sender’s letter to your home. And finally you have the recipient which is you, that is going to receive the mail.

Now let’s see the difference with Electronic Email.

As you can see there’s no difference other than computers are the ones doing the job to deliver the mail. Now that we clarified there’s no difference between regular mail and electronic mail, let me ask you a few questions.

1.       Have you ever lost, regular mail to your home. Family sent you a post card and you never receive it?

2.       Have you ever got late mail, maybe a late statement bill and the envelope look like if it travelled the whole world?

3.       Do you receive Spam in your regular mail to your home?

If you answered Yes! To at least one question then here is the last one, Why is hard to believe the same thing can happen to electronic emails? The drawing you see for electronic emails is the simplest way to visualize and understand how emails work. But honestly that is not even close to the whole process that happens between computers. Even the same concept is for regular mail.

When someone sends you a letter, that letter doesn’t go directly from the sender to your house, I bet you know that. If your family live in New York and you in Florida there’s no way that letter will arrive the same day to your home.

You know if goes from NY > to the Post Office > to the Post Office Car > to the Air Port > to maybe another Air Port > to a Post Office Car > to Post Office > it get filtered to match each address > then back to the Post Office Car or your PO Box > then to your Home.

Wow! Is a long process right? Well e-mails are the same way; they don’t go from the Sender straight to your Mailbox.

Email travel from the Sender Computer > to a Mail Server > to a Mail Server > to a Mail Server > to your Mailbox.

Why Email get lost in transit or late to your mailbox?

Since the spam problems Internet Providers and Mail Server Administrators are trying to protect their servers from virus attacks, spams, etc so they install filters (this will be the same as humans filtering your mail). This can cause emails getting lost or arrive late, let’s use the same example as before:

Email Travel from the Sender Computer > to a Mail Server (Scanned by Antivirus and Antispam) > to a Mail Server (Scanned by Antivirus and Antispam) > to a Mail Server (Scanned by Antivirus and Antispam) > to a Mail Server (Scanned by Antivirus and Antispam) > to your Mailbox.

As you can see now there’s filtering between Server maybe causing emails to get lost in between. What if a server between the Sender and the Recipient is down maybe for a few hours, will you think you are going to get the email anyways on time. Not going to happen, Sender Servers are going to keep trying to send the emails for a few days if necessary until finally gives up. But all that time one of those server  are down it makes the email get delayed.