Email Addresses
"Computer /nm./: a device designed to speed and automate errors." (The Jargon File)
I want to take a moment to show you how to read an Internet address as the sheer length of them can be very intimidating. Learning to read the addresses backwards (from right to left) removes the mystery.
Let's look at a sample email address:
joe@somewhere.co.uk
Every email address has three parts -- a user name, an "at" sign (@), and the address of the user's mail server. In this example, the user name is "joe"and the mail server's address is somewhere.co.uk
If you read the mail server's address from right to left, the first thing you will see is uk. Every internet address is categorised as follows:
- EDU
- Educational sites
- COM
- Commercial sites
- GOV
- Government sites
- NET
- Network administrative organizations
- MIL
- Military sites
- ORG
- Organizations (often not-for-profit)
- INT
- International Organizations
- BIZ
- Business sites
- INFO
- Information Resource sites
- TV
- Television & media sites
- UK
- United Kingdom
- US
- United States
- ...
- (other countries have their own country codes)
So, from the above list, we can deduce that email, to the address joe@somewhere.co.uk, will go to someone in the UK. In the UK, addresses that end co.uk or ltd.uk are likely to be companies whilst org.uk is simply a British organisation.
Email to joe@somewhere.co.uk will go to someone who uses the name "joe" and picks up their email from a mailbox provided by a company called Somewhere in the United Kingdom.
Another email address is wolf@acme.com
Okay, reading this right to left, we see a .com. That means it's a company (commercial) address. In this case, we can't work out what country this company is in but that's not always important, anyway. Remember, email can be sent worldwide and the cost, to you, is the same whether you send an email to your next-door neighbour or your great-aunt in Australia.
What we can say is that someone who uses the name "wolf", has a mailbox at a company with the name acme.
The best rule of thumb I can give you about Internet addresses is this: if the address is not in the form described above and does not end with one of standard abbreviations or country codes, the address is not a standard Internet address. It could be a fake address or it could be an address on a computer network outside the Internet. You may still be able to send mail to such an addresses but it's a lot more complicated.