E-mail (short for ‘electronic mail’) is a method of sending messages electronically from one computing device to another. Plain text e-mails are normally encoded in ASCII text, although many e-mail client applications (Microsoft® Outlook®, for example) support HTML, allowing non-text messages to be sent. It is also possible to send non-text files as a binary attachment to an e-mail message.

SMTP is the standard protocol used for sending e-mail across the Internet, although the POP3 protocol is also commonly used for receiving e-mail that has been stored on a remote server (by an ISP, for example). Many web browsers (including Microsoft® Internet Explorer) also provide support for POP3.