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Concept
Email address
Summary
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by . The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.
An email address, such as john.smith@example.com, is made up from a local-part, the symbol @, and a domain, which may be a domain name or an IP address enclosed in brackets. Although the standard requires the local-part to be case-sensitive, it also urges that receiving hosts deliver messages in a case-independent manner, e.g., that the mail system in the domain example.com treat John.Smith as equivalent to john.smith; some mail systems even treat them as equivalent to johnsmith. Mail systems often limit the users' choice of name to a subset of the technically permitted characters.
With the introduction of internationalized domain names, efforts are progressing to permit non-ASCII characters in email addresses.
An email address consists of two parts, a local-part (sometimes a user name, but not always) and a domain; if the domain is a domain name rather than an IP address then the SMTP client uses the domain name to look up the mail exchange IP address. The general format of an email address is local-part@domain, e.g. jsmith@[192.168.1.2], jsmith@example.com. The SMTP client transmits the message to the mail exchange, which may forward it to another mail exchange until it eventually arrives at the host of the recipient's mail system.
The transmission of electronic mail from the author's computer and between mail hosts in the Internet uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), defined in , and extensions such as RFC 6531.
Official source
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