E-mail is simple. But because there's so much of it in so many different locations, and because enterprise e-mail resides in complex database environments integrating layer-on-layer of useful metadata, it's easy to lose sight of e-mail's inherent simplicity.
An e-mail is as simple as a postcard. Like the back left side of a postcard, an e-mail has an area called the message body reserved for the user's text message. Like a postcard's back right side, another area called the message header is dedicated to information needed to get the card where it's supposed to go and transit data akin to a postmark.
We can liken the picture or drawing on the front of our postcard to an e-mail's attachment. Unlike a postcard, an e-mail's attachment must be converted to letters and numbers for transmission, enabling an e-mail to carry any type of electronic data -- audio, documents, software, video -- not just pretty pictures.
The essential point is that everything in any e-mail is plain text no matter what was transmitted.
And by plain text, I mean the plainest English text, called 7-bit ASCII in geek speak, lacking even the diacritical characters required for accented words in French or Spanish. It is text so simple any letter can be stored in a single byte of data.
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Source: law.com
By: Craig Ball
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