Addressing Email

Email addressing varies. How you do it on your computer and your network might be different than what I show here. Basically, though, there are two kinds of email addresses:

• If you're sending a message to someone who has an account on your computer, address it to that person's username (login name). For instance, if Marty Waters logs on to his account with the username mwaters, you can address his mail to mwaters.
• If you're sending a message to someone who reads mail on another computer, you'll usually need to include that computer's name in your address. Two forms of addresses are pretty common:
  1. Internet addresses have a username, followed by an at sign (@) and the other computer's hostname. For example, if Edie Nisbaum's username is edie and her computer is named giraffe.zoo.utx.edu you'd address Internet mail to her as edie@giraffe.zoo.utx.edu.
  2. UUCP addresses have the other computer's name, followed by an exclamation point (!) and then the username. If Sandi Shore is sandis and her computer is named beach, you might address her mail as beach!sandis.

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This file is from the third edition of the book MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, ISBN 1-56592-093-7, by Jerry Peek. Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. This file is freely-available; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. For more information, see the file copying.htm.