Email Accounts

To send and receive email, you need an email account. That is, an email address. An email account is established for you by a system administrator. This may be your system administrator at your place of employment. Or it may be a system administrator at your ISP or Web hosting company. Some ISPs provide you with more than one email account. Or you may have more than one email address from different sources, such as one from your ISP and one from your Web hosting company. Each email account includes a mailbox where incoming email messages are stored.

Email is sent to the mailbox by a software application called the SMTP server. It receives all the email addressed to a particular domain and sends it to the individual mailbox. The SMTP server also handles the outgoing email, sending it across the Internet to the intended destination. In addition, if your email messages are received and stored on a remote server, such as your ISP's computer, the messages must be downloaded to your computer. An additional software application handles the downloadingeither a POP3 server or an IMAP server.

Mail software on your account allows you to read, send, and otherwise manage the messages in your mailbox. Several email software applications are available. Some major email software is described in the next section.

You need to set up your email software for each email account you use. The email software needs to communicate with the SMTP server. If you need to download email from an ISP, the email software needs to communicate with the server that handles the downloading. You provide the email software with the server addresses when you set up the email account. Your ISP or system administrator provides you with the needed information.