Email Addresses
Almost everyone reading this page has an email address. Many of you will have several. Email today has become as indispensable as the telephone.
In spite of this many people are still unaware of the importance of their email until such a time as they change their ISP and no longer receive any more emails.
Email Address and Domain Names
All email addresses have the form name@domain-name. The domain-name is a name that is registered on the Internet, by yourself or by another company.
Today it is common for
all companies to register their own domain name and so all email addressed to that company would be addressed to someone@company-domain-name.
For individuals/ personal email, it is common today to use the domain name of the email provider, usually the ISP , and the email address has the form
you@ISP-domain-name.
However you may want to consider the advantages of your own email address.
Email Addresses from Free Providers
There are many sources of free email addresses and email accounts. The main ones are:
-
ISP
-
Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail
ISP Email
Your ISP ( Internet service provider) usually provides you with email addresses and web space as part of your Internet package. It is common for most people to use these
email addresses as their main address.
If you use this type of email then the email address has the form you@ISP-domain-name.
Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail
Yahoo and Hotmail are the most common free web based email accounts in the world. They have become popular mainly because they allowed you
to access you email from anywhere in the world via a web browser.
So if your name is John Doe and you have
an email account with Yahoo, then your email address would be:
johndoe@yahoo.com.
What Wrong with these Addresses ?
I personally don't recommend these but as they have a
number of potential problems. See
free email accounts.
But as temporary email addresses they are fine.
Get Your Own Email Address
How about an address like john@johndoe.com. This personal type email address has many advantages and is considered in how to Get and Create Your Own Email Address
Theme based or Personalized Email Addresses
Many companies offer email addresses ( many free) with unusual domain names. Like you@smileyface.com or you@backstreet-boys.com
you@Iluvyou.com.
They can be very amusing and very easy to
remember but maybe not an address for a the long term.
If you are going to use this type of address I wouldn't use it as a main address.
Common Email Techniques
This is a technique for transferring an email from one address to another. For example an email addressed originally to
steve@flasedomain.com can be sent to
steve@gooddomain.com by this technique.
Email forwarding is very common on the Internet and used for a variety of reasons and is covered here in email forwarding.
A catch all address is a special case of email forwarding. With a catch all
email address then all email sent to anyone@yourdomain.com will be forwarded to
a single mailbox.
info@yourdomain.com-----> Mailbox1
sales@yourdomain.com -----> Mailbox1
admin@yourdomain.com -----> Mailbox1
When retrieving email you only need to connect to mailbox1 to retrieve email sent to any of the addresses.
Email Address Verification is the process of establishing the validity of an
address. Used by mailing list owners to prune out old invalid email addresses. See Email address Verification for more details.
Email Addresses, Email Accounts and Mailboxes
It is very important that you are aware of the distinction between an email account (or mailbox) and an email address.
An email account generally gives
you access multiple email addresses and mailboxes used to store
email).
You login to your email account to manage your mailboxes and
email addresses.
You can have an email address and not an email mailbox, in which case you would use email forwarding to forward
the email to an address that had a mailbox associated with it.
Without a mailbox you cannot access or store email.
Therefore all email will need to end up in a mailbox.
Mailboxes are always linked to an email address/addresses but email addresses are not always linked to
mailboxes.
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