EmailElectronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail (hence e- + mail). Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
Email spoofingEmail spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed (for example, so that it cannot be harvested), but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
ZIP (file format)ZIP is an that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. This format was originally created in 1989 and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc.'s PKZIP utility, as a replacement for the previous compression format by Thom Henderson. The ZIP format was then quickly supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP.
VirusA virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, more than 11,000 of the millions of virus species have been described in detail.
JAR (file format)A JAR ("Java archive") file is a package typically used to aggregate many s and associated metadata and resources (text, images, etc.) into one file for distribution. JAR files are s that include a Java-specific . They are built on the and typically have a .jar . A JAR file allows Java runtimes to efficiently deploy an entire application, including its classes and their associated resources, in a single request. JAR file elements may be compressed, shortening download times.
Trojan horse (computing)In computing, a Trojan horse is any malware that misleads users of its true intent by disguising itself as a standard program. The term is derived from the ancient Greek story of the deceptive Trojan Horse that led to the fall of the city of Troy. Trojans are generally spread by some form of social engineering. For example, where a user is duped into executing an email attachment disguised to appear innocuous (e.g., a routine form to be filled in), or by clicking on a fake advertisement on social media or anywhere else.
Computer networkA computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies. The nodes of a computer network can include personal computers, servers, networking hardware, or other specialized or general-purpose hosts.
Email addressAn email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by . The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group.
Computer securityComputer security, cyber security, digital security or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attacks by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, theft of, or damage to hardware, software, or data, as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide. The field is significant due to the expanded reliance on computer systems, the Internet, and wireless network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Email encryptionEmail encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication. Email is prone to the disclosure of information. Most emails are encrypted during transmission, but they are stored in clear text, making them readable by third parties such as email providers. By default, popular email services such as Gmail and Outlook do not enable end-to-end encryption.
IP addressAn Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. However, because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, was standardized in 1998.
