Network Technologies 2024

UNIT-5

MAIL SERVICES

1. Application Layer services:

Functions of Application Layer:

 Application Layer provides a facility by which users can forward several

emails and it also provides a storage facility.
 This layer allows users to access, retrieve and manage files in a remote
computer.
 It allows users to log on as a remote host.
 This layer provides access to global information about various services.
 This layer provides services which include: e-mail, transferring files,
distributing results to the user, directory services, network resources and so
on.
 It provides protocols that allow software to send and receive information and
present meaningful data to users.
 It handles issues such as network transparency, resource allocation and so on.
 This layer serves as a window for users and application processes to access
network services.
 Application Layer is basically not a function, but it performs application layer
functions.
 The application layer is actually an abstraction layer that specifies the shared
protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communication network.
 Application Layer helps us to identify communication partners, and
synchronizing communication.
 This layer allows users to interact with other software applications.
 In this layer, data is in visual form, which makes users truly understand data
rather than remembering or visualize the data in the binary format (0’s or 1’s).
 This application layer basically interacts with Operating System (OS) and thus
further preserves the data in a suitable manner.
 This layer also receives and preserves data from it’s previous layer, which is
Presentation Layer (which carries in itself the syntax and semantics of the
information transmitted).
 The protocols which are used in this application layer depend upon what
information users wish to send or receive.

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 This application layer, in general, performs host initialization followed by

remote login to hosts.
1. Concepts of email
2. Working of email account and services
 The email refers to the electronic means of communication of sending and
receiving messages over the Internet. Email is the most common form of
communication nowadays.
 E-mail system comprises of the following three components:
Mailer
Mail Server
Mailbox
 Mailer
It is also called mail program, mail application or mail client. It
allows us to manage, read and compose e-mail.
 Mail Server
The function of mail server is to receive, store and deliver the email.
It is must for mail servers to be running all the time because if it
crashes or is down, email can be lost.
 Mailboxes
Mailbox is generally a folder that contains emails and information
about them.

Components of an Email:

1. Sender: The sender creates an email in which he records the information that
needs to be transferred to the receiver.
2. Receiver: The receiver gets the information sent by the sender via email.
3. Email address: An email address is just like a house address where the
communication arrives for the sender and receiver and they communicate with
each other.
4. Mailer: The mailer program contains allows the ability to read, write, manage
and delete the emails like Gmail, Outlook, etc.
5. Mail Server: The mail server is responsible for sending, receiving, managing,
and recording all the data proceeded by their respective mail programs and then
processing them to their respective users.

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6. SMTP: SMTP stands for Simple mail transfer protocol. SMTP basically uses the
internet network connection to send and receive email messages over the
Internet.

Protocols of Email:

Emails basically use two types of standard protocols for communication over the
Internet. They are:-
1. POP: POP stands for post office protocol for email. Similar to a post office, our
approach is just to drop the email over the service mail provider and then leave it
for services to handle the transfer of messages. We can be even disconnected from
the Internet after sending the email via POP. Also, there is no requirement of
leaving a copy of the email over the web server as it uses very little memory. POP
allows using concentrate all the emails from different email addresses to
accumulate on a single mail program. Although, there are some disadvantages of
POP protocol like the communication medium is unidirectional, i.e it will transfer
information from sender to receiver but not vice versa.
2. IMAP: IMAP stands for Internet message access protocol. IMAP has some
special advantages over POP like it supports bidirectional communication over
email and there is no need to store conversations on servers as they are already
well-maintained in a database. It has some advanced features like it tells the
sender that the receiver has read the email sent by him.

Working of Email:

1. When the sender sends the email using the mail program, then it gets redirected to
the simple mail transfer protocol which checks whether the receiver’s email
address is of another domain name or it belongs to the same domain name as that
of the sender (Gmail, Outlook, etc.). Then the email gets stored on the server for
later purposes transfer using POP or IMAP protocols.

2. If the receiver has another domain name address then, the SMTP protocol
communicates with the DNS (domain name server) of the other address that the
receiver uses. Then the SMTP of the sender communicates with the SMTP of the
receiver which then carries out the communication and the email gets delivered in
this way to the SMTP of the receiver.

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3. If due to certain network traffic issues, both the SMTP of the sender and the
receiver are not able to communicate with each other, the email to be transferred is
put in a queue of the SMTP of the receiver and then it finally gets receiver after
the issue resolves. And if due to very bad circumstances, the message remains in a
queue for a long time, then the message is returned back to the sender as
undelivered.

From Sender to Receiver:

The sender first needs the email address of the receiver to send the information to be
communicated via email. When the sender writes all the information in the email along
with the email address of the receiver and clicks on the send button, the mail program
transfers the message to the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) which is transferred from the
local computer of the sender to the mail server via the SMTP protocol.

Then the webmail server looks out for the similar mail transfer agent of the receiver and
locates it whether it is using the same DNS (domain name server) or a different service.
The DNS looks for the mail exchanger service of the receiver. Now, the SMTP protocol
transfers the message between both mail servers through their mailing agents. Then the
receiver’s MTA finally transfers this message to the receiver’s local computer.
In case, the receiver uses POP protocol then when he receives the email, then the copy
of the email at the web server will get deleted. And if he uses IMAP then the copy of
the email gets stored on the web server and it can be changed at any time by the user.

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3. URL and URL types (Absolute, Relative)

 URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Any internet location available on
server is called a web URL, web address or website. Each website or webpage has a
unique address called URL. e.g., the website of amazon website has an address or
URL called https://www.amazon.co.in/

Types of URL: URL gives the address of files created for webpages or other documents like
an image, pdf for a doc file, etc.
There are two types of URL:
 Absolute URL
 Relative URL

Absolute URL: This type of URL contains both the domain name and directory/page path. An
absolute URL gives complete location information. It begins with a protocol
like “http://” and continues, including every detail. An absolute URL
typically comes with the following syntax.
protocol://domain/path
For web browsing, absolute URL’s are types in the address bar of a web
browser. For example, if it is related to customer support page link
of amazon website, the URL should be mentioned
as https://www.amazon.in/gp/help/customer/display.html/ this gives the
complete information about the file location path.
Note: The protocol may be of following types.
http://, https://, ftp://, gopher://, etc.
Relative URL: This type of URL contains the path excluding the domain name. Relative
means “in relation to”, and a relative URL tells a URL location on terms of
the current location. Relative path is used for reference to a given link of a
file that exist within the same domain.
Let us assume a web developer setting up a webpage and want to link an
image called “amazon.jpg”.
<img src="amazon.jpg">
It would internally be interpreted like the following.
<img src="./amazon.jpg">
The dot(.) before the “/” in the src attribute is a “special character”. It means
the location should be started from the current directory to find the file
location.

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2. Case study of email:

1. from sender to receiver (Mailer, Mail Server, Mailbox)
 Refer 5.1.2
2. Functionality and use of protocols at different layers
 Refer 5.1.2
3. Case study of locating Website:
1. URL and locating URL
 A URL is a type of uniform resource identifier and is address of a resource
on the World Wide Web and the protocol used to access it. It is used to
indicate the location of a web resource to access the web pages. For
example, to visit the amazon website, you will go to the URL
www.amazon.co.in, which is the URL for the amazon website.

The URL sends users to a specific resource online such as video, webpage, or
other resources. When you search any query on Google, it will display the
multiple URLs of the resource that are all related to your search query. The
displayed URLs are the hyperlink to access the webpages.

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) contains the information, which is as

follows:

o The port number on the server, which is optional.

o It contains a protocol that is used to access the resource.
o The location of the server
o A fragment identifier
o In the directory structure of the server, it contains the location of the
resource.

The additional information about the URL is described below with the help
of an example:

Let's take an example: https://www.amazon.co.in/contact.htm, it indicates the

jtp.htm is a file located on the server with the address of javatpoint.com.

http:// or https://

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The http is a protocol that stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It tells the
browser to which protocol will be preferred to use for accessing the
information that is specified in the domain.

The https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an enhanced protocol as

compared to http as it concerned with security. It provides the surety that the
information, which is transmitted over HTTP is secure and encrypted. The
colon (:) and two forward slashes (//) are used to separate the protocol from
the rest of the part of the URL.

www.

The www is used to distinguish the content, which stands for World Wide
Web. This portion of the URL can be left out many times, as it is not
required. For instance, if you type "http://amazon.co.in," you will still get the
amazon website. For an important subpage, this portion can also be
substituted, which is known as a subdomain.

amazon.co.in

The amazon.co.in is the domain name for the website, and the .co.in is called
TLD or suffix. It helps to identify the location or type of the website. For
example, ".org" stands for an organization, ".co.uk" stands for the United
Kingdom, and ".com" is for commercial. There are various types of domain
suffixes available; you are required to register the name through a domain
registrar to get a domain.

contact.htm

The contact.htm is the name of the web page, and the .htm is the file
extension of the web page, which describes the file is an HTML file. There
are many other file extensions available on the internet such as .php, .html,
.xml, .jpg, .gif, .asp, .cgi, etc.

5.3.2 Steps and protocols involved in accessing URL

Whenever you visit a page on the web, your computer uses the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to download that page from another computer
somewhere on the Internet.

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 Let's step through that process.

Step 1: Direct browser to URL

 When we want to browse the web, we can use many types of computers (like
laptops, desktops, and phones), as long as the computer has a browser application
installed.
 The user either types a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the browser or follows
a link from an already opened page:

 Diagram of browser window with URL in address bar:

"http://www.example.com/index.html"
 Notice something about that URL: it starts with "http". That's a signal to the
browser that it needs to use HTTP to fetch the document for that URL.
 What browser are you using now? What's the URL of this website? What does it
start with?

Step 2: Browser looks up IP

 We typically type nice human-friendly URLs into browsers, like
"khanacademy.org" and "wikipedia.org". Those domain names map to IP
addresses, the true location of the domain's computers. That's handled by
the Domain Name System.
 The browser uses a DNS resolver to map the domain to an IP address:

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 Diagram with laptop on left and server on right. Laptop has browser window and
arrow going to server that's labeled "www.example.com = ?". Server is labeled
"DNS resolver" and has arrow going back to laptop that says "93.184.216.34"

Step 3: Browser sends HTTP request

 Once the browser identifies the IP address of the computer hosting the requested
URL, it sends an HTTP request.

 Diagram with laptop on left and server on right. Laptop has browser window and
arrow going to server with packet above it that contains HTTP request. Server is
labeled with "www.example.com" and its IP address "93.184.216.34".
 An HTTP request can be as short as two lines of text:

 GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

 Host: www.example.com
 The first word is the HTTP verb: "GET". There are other verbs for other actions on
the web, like submitting form data ("POST").

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 The next part specifies the path: "/index.html". The host computer stores the
content of the entire website, so the browser needs to be specific about which page
to load.
 The final part of the first line specifies the protocol and the version of the protocol:
"HTTP/1.1".
 The second line specifies the domain of the requested URL. That's helpful in case a
host computer stores the content for multiple websites.

Step 4: Host sends back HTTP response

 Once the host computer receives the HTTP request, it sends back a response with
both the content and metadata about it.

Step 5: The browser renders the response

The browser now has all the information it needs to render the document requested.

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Types of Protocols
1. TCP/IP: TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the basic
point-to-point meaning each communication is from one point (or host computer) in
the network to another point or host computer communication protocol on the
Internet. It is used as a communication protocol in all types of networks. When you
are connected to the Internet, your computer provides you a copy of the TCP/IP
program when you need to send messages to or get information from the other
computer.
TCP/IP is a two-layer protocol. The top layer, TCP(Transmission Control
Protocol) manages the assembling of a message or file divided into smaller packets
that are transmitted over the Internet and received by a TCP that reassembles the
packets into the original message on the destination computer. The lower layer,
Internet Protocol, handles the address part of each packet so that it gets to the right
destination. Each gateway computer on the network checks for the address to
forward the message. Some packets from the same message are routed differently
than others, but they are reassembled at the destination.
2. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is a set of standards that allows
users of the World Wide Web to exchange information found on web pages on the
internet. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what
actions web server and browsers should take in response to various commands.
Today’s modern browsers no longer require HTTP in front of the URL since it is the
default method of communication. But, it is still used in browsers because of the
need to access other protocols such as FTP through the browser. The HTTP provides
a standard for Web browsers and servers to communicate.
3. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard protocol used on a network to transfer
the files from one host computer to another host computer using a TCP based
network, such as the Internet.
FTP uses separate control and data connections between the client and the server. To
use FTP server, users need to authenticate themselves using a sign-in protocol, using
a username and password but can connect anonymously if the server is configured to
allow it. For secured transmission the data encrypts (hides) the username and
password, and even encrypt the content, using SSL.
To transfer files with FTP, use a program often called the client. An FTP client
program initiates a connection to a remote computer running FTP server software.
After the connection is established, the client can choose to send and/or receive files.
To connect to an FTP server, a client requires a username and password as set on the
server. Many FTP servers use a username as “anonymous”. Using FTP, you can also
update (delete, rename, move, and copy) files to a server. You need to login to an
FTP server. However, publicly available files are easily accessed using anonymous

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FTP.
FTP using TCP/IP works in the same way as HTTP used for transferring Web
pages from a server to a user’s browser. FTP sites are heavily used and require
several attempts before connecting.

5.3.3 Concepts of search engine and purpose

A search engine is a software program that provides information according to the user
query. It finds various websites or web pages that are available on the internet and gives
related results according to the search.

How do Search Engines Work?

Search engines are generally working on three parts that are crawling, indexing, and
ranking.

1. Crawling: Search engines have a number of computers programs that are responsible
for finding information that is publicly available on the internet. These programs scan
the web and create a list of all available websites. Then they visit each website and by
reading HTML code they try to understand the structure of the page, the type of the
content, the meaning of the content, and when it was created or updated.
 Why crawling is important? Because your first concern when optimizing
your website for search engines is to make sure that they can access it
correctly. If they cannot find your content you won’t get any ranking or
search engine traffic.

2. Indexing: Information identified by the crawler needs to be organized, Sorted, and

Stored so that it can be processed later by the ranking algorithm. Search engines don’t
store all the information in your index, but they keep things like the Title and
description of the page, the type of content, Associated keywords Number of incoming
and outgoing links, and a lot of other parameters that are needed by the ranking
algorithm.
 Why indexing is important? Because if your website is not in their index it
will not appear for any searches this also means that if you have any pages
indexed you have more chances of appearing in the search results for a
related query.

3. Ranking: Ranking is the position by which your website is listed in any Search
Engine. There is following three steps in which how ranking works.

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 Step 1: Analyze user query – This step is to understand what kind of

information the user is looking for. To do that analyzes the user’s query by
breaking it down into a number of meaningful keywords. A keyword is a word
that has a specific meaning and purpose, for example when you type how to
make a chocolate cupcake search engines know that you are looking for specific
information so the results will contain recipes and step-by-step instructions. They
can also understand the meaning of how to change a light bulb is the same as
how to replace a light bulb search engines are clever enough to interpret spelling
mistakes also.
 Step 2: Finding matching pages – This step is to look into their index and find
the best matching pages, for example, if you search dark wallpaper then it gives
you the result of images, not text.
 Step 3: Present the results to the users – A typical search results page includes
ten organic results in most cases it is enriched with other elements like paid Ads,
direct answers for specific queries, etc.
Performance of Search Engine
The performance of search engine is determined by 2 requirements. They are:
 Effectiveness (quality of result).
 Efficiency (Response time & through put).
Components of Search Engine
There three components in search engine. They are web crawler, data base, and search
interface:
 Web crawler: A search engine uses multiple web crawlers to crawl through World
Wide Web and gather information. It is basically software which is also known bat
or spider.
 Data base: The information which is gathered by web crawler by crawling through
internet is stored on the database.
 Search Interface: Search interface is just an interface to the data base which is
employed by the user to search through the data base.
Basic building blocks of search engine:
There are basically two building blocks which perform various activities.
 Indexing
 Querying
Indexing: Indexing Indexing performs mainly 3 activities text acquisition, text
transformation index creation.
i) Text acquisition: Text acquisition basically identifies and stores documents into data
base for indexing. It converts variety of documents into a consistent data
Format. It also stores text Meta data and other related information of
document.

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ii) Text transformation: It transforms document into indexed terms.
 Parser: It recognizes the “words’ in the text with the help of tokenizer and
process the sequence of text tokens to recognize structural pattern.
 Stopping: Removes stop words like “and”, “or”, “the”.
 Stemming: It groups together all the words derived from same stem.
 Link analysis: It is used identify the popularity page. It uses links & of &
anchor text from web pages.
 Information extraction: Information extraction identifies classes of index
terms which are important for some application.
 Classifier: Identifies class related data of document.
iii) Index creation:
 Document statistics: It collects the features like position & count of words.
 Weighing: Calculates weights of index terms.
 Inversion: As the format of inverted files is fast for query processing it
converts document term information to term document information
 Querying: It consists following three tasks
 User interaction: User interaction provides a query input which gives an
interface and parser for query language. Then it transforms the query by
improving query. Then it shows the output by constructing the display of
ranked documents for a query.
 Ranking: It first calculates the score of document by using ranking algorithms.
It processes query in distributed environment.
 Score: qi*di , Where qj & di are term weights for term i query and document
 Evaluation: It this step it logs user queries & interaction for improving search
engines efficiency & effectiveness.

Usage of Search Engine

Search engines have so many usages and some of them are:
 Searching for information: People use a search engine to search for any kind
of information present on the internet. For example, Rohit wants to buy a
mobile phone but he does not know which one is the best mobile phone. So he
searches “best mobile phones in 2021” in the search engine and gets the list of
best mobile phones along with their features, reviews, and prices.
 Searching images and videos: Search engines are also used to search images
and videos. There are so many videos and images available on the internet in
different categories like plants, animals, flowers, etc., you can search them
according to your need.
 Searching location: Search engines are also used to find locations. For
example, Seema is on a Goa trip but she doesn’t know the location of Palolem

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beach. So she searches “Palolem beach” on the search engine and then the
search engine gives the best route to reach Palolem beach.
 Searching people: Search engines are also used to find people on the internet
around the world.
 Shopping: Search engines are also used for shopping. Search engines optimize
the pages to meet the needs of the user and give the lists of all the websites that
contain the specified product according to the best price, reviews, free
shipping, etc.
 Entertainment: Search engines are also used for entertainment purposes. It is
used to search videos, movies, games, movie trailers, reviews of movies, social
networking sites, etc. For example, Rohan wants to watch a movie named
“Ram”, then he searches this movie on a search engine and the search engine
returns a list of links (of the websites) that contain the Ram movie.
 Education: Search engines are also used for education. With the help of search
engines, people can learn anything they wanted to learn like cooking,
programming languages, home decorations, etc. It is like an open school where
you can learn anything for free.

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