Question

If I send an email using my college’s mail server to say my google email from my home, does my email initially get sent to my ISP’s mail server which then sends an email to my college’s mail server to then get sent to the google mail server

or

do I establish a connection with the college mail server directly and have the email get sent to my google mail without going through my local mail server?

thanks

Answer 1

E-mail is sent by the actual server. There are no hops between mail servers as far as getting the actual content. It is all done through dns (domain name servers).

your account in your college mail server is, most likely dns-ed like this:

top-domain       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
- mail server    xxx.xxx.xxx.XXX or a variation of it

When you send an e-mail using your college account, your dns (which could be your provider’s servers) look up the domain name required and, within it, what is the ip address of the mail server and send the comunication packet (in this case the e-mail package) to your college’s mail server.

Your college mail server, then, accept it or reject it based on the registered accounts. Then, it delivers to the recipient.

In case the recipient is within the college’s mail server, the process ends within the college mail server. If the recipient is, like you mentioned, your google account (gmail?), then YOUR MAIL SERVER dns setup will look up the ip for the google mail server and forward the packet over.

So, the actual content of your e-mail is not seen by your provider. HOWEVER, given nowadays processing power of computers and networks, changes are that your internet provider COULD (but should not) snoop e-mail messages by keywords in it and, who knows, flag the message and send to CIA, FBI, etc. IT IS POSSIBLE, and, even though should not happen (privacy rights). IT COULD HAPPEN.