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Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems. Historically, a variety of electronic mail system designs
evolved that were often incompatible or not interoperable. With the proliferation of the Internet since the early 1980s, however, the standardization efforts of Internet architects succeeded in promulgating a single standard based on the Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. Modern e-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only
connect to the e-mail infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message transmission or retrieval to or from their designated server. Rarely is e-mail transmitted directly from one user's device to
another's. While, originally, e-mail consisted only of text messages composed in the ASCII character set, virtually any media format can be sent today, including attachments of audio and video clips.
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