I’m trying to move away from Google and replace my Gmail account. But reading about the different options, I’m realizing I don’t really understand email at all - e.g. the difference between the client and the domain name, the different protocols, encryption.
Does anyone have articles or books to suggest as a “Basics of Email: 101”? Thank you!


Thank you, that is helpful. I mentioned this in another comment, but an issue that I have run into before is where an institutional outlook email would not connect to Thunderbird. It seemed to be an issue around them not enabling IMAP on their side but I couldn’t understand why I was able to get the email added to Thunderbird and go through 2FA , but the account still would not sync.
I’m not expecting you to act as tech support! Just using this example to demonstrate the type of problem I experienced that made me want to better understand how email works.