More of this Feature • Part 1: First Contact • Part 2: The First Message • Part 3: The Sender, Carbon Copies • Part 5: Every Message has a Subject • Part 6: Writing the Message • Part 7: How Email Travels

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Even more email addresses! "Fine, but what are these beasts?" John wondered. He asked Jane (but he used some more elaborate words). Jane wondered how to explain email addresses best: "Let's suppose you want to send an email to me (and this is what you do want to do, huh?). My email address is trine-at-about-dot-com." John looked puzzled. Hew knew that "Trine" was Jane's nickname, but still that mess of letters did not make much sense to him.

Forming Email Addresses

Jane typed her email address in the "To:" field: trine@about.com. Then she explained: "An email address nowadays always contains a '@'. This means 'at' and serves as a separator. To the left is the user name of a person 'at' a domain to the right. The domain can be a company, for example. In my case it's 'about.com'. But also 'microsoft.com' or 'whitehouse.gov' are domains. At 'microsoft.com', you could have 'bill' and 'steve'. Their email addresses would be 'bill@microsoft.com' and 'steve@microsoft.com', respectively."

"Ah, I see. If my university's domain is 'bahama.edu' and I'm 'john' then my email address is 'john@bahama.edu'?" John was a witty guy. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Jane likes him so much. "Yes, exactly." she replied.

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