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How does e-mail work?
Usually, network administrators (the people who manage the interactivity
of many computers) use two different servers for the handling of e-mail, one for incoming messages and one for
outgoing messages.Larger ISP's (internet service providers) usually will use one server, whose address begins with
pop3, for incoming messages and another server, whose address begins with smtp, for outgoing
messages. But sometimes, especially in the case of smaller networks, the same server can be utilized. For example,
here at Antelope Valley College, only one server, whose address is kirk.avc.edu, is used for both incoming
and outgoing messages.
What does all this mean to you? Relatively little if you have configured
your e-mail client correctly. All you need to do is open the program you use to
send and receive e-mail (which may be a part of your web browser) and check for new messages or compose a new message.
Your only real concern is making sure that you have given other people your correct e-mail address and that you
have a correct address to send messages to.
E-mail addresses all have basically the same structure which is username@domainname.suffix.
Let's look at each part of the name in detail.
At Antelope Valley College, the username follows the flast convention,
in which f stands for the first initial of the user's first name, and last is the user's full
last name. For example, instructor Neil Continent's user name would be ncontinent.
The domain name is the name of the address for the server and is unique to
that server. Antelope Valley College's domain name is avc.
The suffix indicates the type of organization that is running the server, and
a few of the suffixes now in use are com (for commercial), edu (for education), gov (for government),
org (for nonprofit organization), and net (for computer network). It becomes obvious then why AVC's
suffix is edu.
Our Mr. Continent's e-mail address would then be ncontinent@avc.edu.
So, in the future, if you ask a student for his e-mail address, and he responds with
http://www.avc.edu, you will know that he is misinformed, and you can press him for the truth.
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