Email looks simple from the outside: you type, you hit send, it arrives. Underneath sits a postal system with protocols, identity checks, reputation scores, and encryption layers. This course walks through all of it.
Purpose
Getting an email reliably and safely into someone’s inbox depends on several systems working together. Miss one and your mail bounces, lands in spam, or gets read by the wrong people. This course covers the full path, using simple analogies (and a recurring cast of Alice and Bob) to keep the concepts concrete.
You will work through:
- SMTP basics - the protocol that moves a message from sender to recipient
- Authentication - SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, the digital equivalents of a return address and a wax seal
- Reputation - why mailbox providers treat your sending domain like a credit score
- Deliverability - bounces, feedback loops, and throttling, the practices that keep you in the inbox
- Security and encryption - TLS, S/MIME, and PGP, for protecting the contents in transit and at rest
- Implementation - a practical rollout plan, including multi-domain setups
Each chapter stands on its own, but they build in order: authentication feeds reputation, reputation drives deliverability, and encryption protects everything along the way.
This course was created for the Haply Robotics IT team. The concepts apply to any domain owner who sends email.