IT basics
How an email gets from you to them
Email feels instant and simple. Behind each message is a short journey with several checks along the way.
1 min readExplainer
The short version
When you press Send, your message passes between mail servers, gets checked and lands in a mailbox, usually in seconds. Here is the journey.
The journey
- You press Send. Your mail app hands the message to your email service, such as Microsoft 365.
- Your service looks up the recipient’s domain in DNS to find which mail system accepts their mail.
- The two systems connect and pass the message across, usually encrypted.
- The receiving system checks it: is the sender who they claim to be, is it spam, is anything in it dangerous?
- It lands in the inbox, the junk folder or quarantine, or is rejected and bounced back to you.
All of this usually takes a few seconds.
Why some messages go missing
- Junk folder: the receiving system was not sure, often because the sending domain lacks the right security records.
- Quarantine: held by a filter, which an administrator can release.
- Bounce: rejected outright, with a message explaining why. Read the bounce; it usually says what went wrong.
- Typo in the address, more often than anyone likes to admit.
If your messages keep landing in spam
Check your domain’s email security records (SPF, DKIM and DMARC). Missing or wrong records are the most common cause. (Read more.)
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