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→Learning About the Services Involved in an Email Delivery
** The mail message then travels the rest of the way to the destination MTA <u>unencrypted</u>, so anyone with access to the routers in-between can read all your emails. That is why many organizations will refuse to send you confidential information over email.
* The '''LDA/MDA''' will receive the email from the MTA, and will store it on disk in some format. '''MailDir''' and '''MBOX''' are the most popular mailbox formats.
* '''IMAP/POP3''' server(s). When sending an email, you send it to the destination using your MTA, but you also want to save it in your '''"Sent"''' folder for yourself. This is accomplished by a separate connection to either your '''IMAP''' or '''POP3''' server.
** Thus, a situation can occur that although you sent your email successfully, it may never make it to your "Sent" folder - the <u>second</u> connection to your IMAP server is quite unrelated to the first connection to the '''SMTP''' server.
* Note that a DNS server is also involved - it is needed to retrieve the address of the email server responsible for email for a particular domain. This is done with MX records.