Electronic mail, or email, is a very popular application in computer networks such as the Internet. Email `appeared <http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html>`_ in the early 1970s and allows users to exchange text based messages. Initially, it was mainly used to exchange short messages, but over the years its usage has grown. It is now not only used to exchange small, but also long messages that can be composed of several parts as we will see later.
