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Introduction to Email Electronic mail addresses

Electronic mail must be addressed properly, in much the same way as a normal letter needs to be addressed, in order that it can reach its intended recipient. However, with electronic mail the addressing has to be slightly different and must be more precise than a conventional mail address.
Most email uses is addressed using internet addresses. These are supported by what is known as the Domain Name Server (DNS). This is an internationally distributed naming scheme and the components of each address are structured in a hierarchical manner. These start with the mailname of the person, followed by various address components, ending with the "Top level" domain (often a country code). In this respect, the addressing is in the same order as that of a conventional letter.

For example

E.V.Nebor@bham.ac.uk

The mailname comes first, indicating who the email is for. The "@" sign separates the mailname from the site. The next components indicate details of the system to which the email is sent.
bham = birmingham
ac = academic
uk = Great Britain

The final component ("top level" domain) is normally the ISO3166 standard two letter country code. There are, however, two main types of exception. One is Great Britain (gb) which uses "uk". The other exceptions are mainly some of American domains (eg edu, mil, gov). These are at the same "level" in the naming scheme as countries.

Addresses of this form are also known as rfc822 addresses, because that is the name of the Internet standard in which the addresses were originally described.

Partially qualified addresses

Some systems will allow the address to be specified in an incomplete form. For example,
E.V.Nebor@bham.ac.uk

could be expressed as
E.V.Nebor@bham

This is known as a partially qualified address. The use of these names is NOT RECOMMENDED, as they are not universally recognised and are a cause of many errors and much confusion. The full address should always be used.

Other addressing schemes

There are other addressing schemes in use, and very occasionally some users will need to be aware of these. These are documented in the Miscellaneous email page.

Last Updated 18 Aug 2000. Please mail any comments to C.B.Bayliss@bham.ac.uk