Question:
How does a router work?
2013-11-23 11:22:28 UTC
So, my query is whenever someone sends me a mail to my computer, its the router that determines if the mail has been sent to the right address. My question is how does the router identify that? I am a little confused that whenever someone sends some mail to my address, the router must have a way to identify that it has been addressed to the right address. What is that address and how does the router identify that?
Three answers:
Richard
2013-11-23 14:29:47 UTC
There are two answers to this question depending upon where your email is actually stored before it reaches your computer, and how the email is delivered to your computer.



For most home users, email addresses actually refer to a an external mailbox such as:



someone@yahoo.com

or

someone@your_isp.com



In this situation your computer makes an outgoing connection to an external mailbox that is being hosted by a company such a Yahoo or your ISP. The outgoing connection might be by a browser such as Internet Explorer or an email client such as Outlook Express. This is flexible in that you can access your email from anywhere that has full Internet access.



The alternative is that you are hosting a mail server on your computer. In this case, you will have an email address that translates in the world's DNS servers to your IP address provided by your ISP. Your ISP will send the email to your router, which will need port forwarding to be set up so that it can forward the email to the computer running your mail server.



It is most likely that you are using the first scenario I have described.



I hope this helps.
?
2013-11-23 14:21:47 UTC
You are confusing several different concepts.



First, mail is only sent and received from a mail server, not your personal computer. When mail is addressed to "you@gmail.com" or "you@yourdomain.com" for example, the mail is sent to the mail server. Your personal computer gets involved only when you use your web browser or email client to connect to the mail server to read or use POP/IMAP to download the mail. At that point, you open up a connect from your PC to the mail server, which goes through your router. What your router does, is it knows your internet ip address from your ISP, and your local ip address on your local network, and it manages the connection between the two.
?
2013-11-23 11:33:44 UTC
Its IP address, to find out your computer! In your email address, the domain is specific to you & second part is to find the server of e-mail provider. For eg: abc@yahoo.com abc is the specific person & yahoo.com is the yahoo server.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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