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** The rest of the way to the destination MTA the emails travel completely unencrypted, so anyone with access to the routers in between can read all your emails. This is why many organizations will refuse to send you confidential information over email.
* The LDA/MDA will receive the email from the MTA, and will store it on disk in some format. MailDir and MBOX are the most popular mailbox formats.
* When sending an email you send it to the destination using your MTA, but you also want to save it in your "Sent" folder for yourself. This is accomplished by a separate connection to your IMAP or POP3 server.
** This is why it can happen that you sent your email successfully but it never makes it to your "Sent" folder - the second connection to your IMAP server is quite unrelated to the first connection to the SMTP server.
* Note that a DNS server is also involved - it's needed to retrieve the address of the email server responsible for email for a particular domain. This is done with the MX records we looked at in the DNS labs.
