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What is an email address

You decide to register on a site you like, and the registration form asks you for an email address. But you are hearing about it for the first time, and the authorization had to be cancelled. Or you met a friend with whom you lost contact a long time ago, and now you want to constantly communicate with him, but he suddenly also asked you for the above address. What to say to him in response? Don't get frustrated and don't get lost. Read this article, and you will no longer get into trouble when faced with an incomprehensible combination of words.

Before dealing with the main issue, you need to understand what the concept of e-mail is all about. Back in 1965, two colleagues from the famous American Institute of Technology in Massachusetts developed a program that allows you to send messages from one computer to another. The program was called - Mail, translated from English - "mail". It was extremely simple and worked only in relation to two computers - the sender and the addressee. Progress did not stand still, and over time, the idea of programmers acquired improvements. The result was a global email distribution service. From now on, any information from a computer, whether it be music, business documents, photos or personal letters, can be forwarded to any recipient you choose. And in the same way, the listed information resources can be forwarded to you. At the same time, the virtual mail system is not much different from the usual one - it also has envelopes, items, attachments, and most importantly - mailboxes. By opening a web box, you reserve yourself free space on the network, using which you will send and receive your correspondence.

This is where the definition of an email address comes in. Mailboxes from ordinary life are marked with numbers. Electronic mailboxes on the network have their own unique names, which are called their address. These addresses are made up of two components. The first part is a designation that you personally come up with. At the moment, it can only consist of letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers and some other characters. The second part indicates belonging to the portal that will service the mailbox being created. After all, as among non-virtual mail services, various web systems are ready to provide you with e-mail on the Internet. It is customary in the world to separate the unique name selected by the user from the postal service brand mark with a dog sign - @. Sometimes in the second part of the address you can trace the identifier of the country under the flag of which the virtual mailbox was created. Let's imagine that you decide to start a mailbox on the well-known Mailru portal and choose the name superbox for it. Then, in the final version, the address of your mailbox will look something like this - [email protected], where at the beginning is your word, then the belonging to the portal and, through a dot, the abbreviation of the country name, in this case Russia. But often the extensions .org or .com can be after the dot.

To date, the most common Internet mail services are Hotmail (working since 1996), Yahoo! Mail, opened in 1997, the Russian free e-mail service Mail.Ru (launched in 1998), the mail service from Yandex (2000) and mail launched in 2004 from Google - Gmail. There are many smaller web resources that provide e-mail services. All of them so far work only with addresses in Latin. But the developers promise that soon the email address can be assigned in Cyrillic letters.