Understanding Email Addresses

The only piece of information you need to send email to someone is that person's Internet email address. An email address is easy to spot: It always has that "at" symbol ( @ ) in the middle of it. For example, you know at a glance that

[e-mail]

is an email address. In most email addresses, everything following the @ symbol is the domain address of a company, Internet service provider, educational institution, or other organization. The part before the @ is the name (or user ID) of a particular employee or user . For example, the addresses

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

obviously belong to three different people, all of whom work for the same company or use the same Internet service provider (whatever Genco is).

Each online service has its own domain, too: For example, America Online's is aol.com, and Microsoft Network's is msn.com. So you can tell that the email address

[e-mail]

is that of the America Online user named neddyboy .

Online service users usually can omit the @ symbol and anything that follows it when sending to other users on the same service. For example, suppose you want to send email to

[e-mail]

If you use a regular Internet ISP or any online service other than America Online (aol.com), you would use the address as shown. However, if you use America Online, you can address the message simply to

 allieoop