Common E?mail Terms

When discussing e?mail you will be exposed to a number of different terms that you may not be familiar with. Here are the most common:

Bounced E?mail: E?mail messages that get returned to the sender because there was some sort of problem and the e?mail could not be delivered.

E?mail Address: This is what people type in to send e?mail to you—<user@domain.com>. E?mail addresses always include the @ (at sign).

E?mail Body: The main section of the e?mail with whatever text you have written.

E?mail Headers: Several lines of information that appear prior to the body of an e?mail message. The headers contain a lot of information about where mail has come from and which mail server received it. Most e?mail programs don’t show full headers by default since there can be so many of them. If you are having problems with spam or bounced e?mail messages, the full headers of the message contain information that can help track down the problem.

IMAP: This is a protocol for fetching e?mail from a remote web server. IMAP is designed to manage all mail on the remote mail server. IMAP is a good protocol to use if you travel a lot and want to be able to access all of your mail from anywhere. However, if your mail server is having problems you likely won’t be able to access any mail (even old mail) until the server comes back online.

Mailbox: The location where mail is stored for an e?mail address.

MX Record: An MX (Mail eXchange) record tells the server where e?mail for a particular domain should be sent.

Password Authentication: This is one method you can use to prove that the e?mail account is yours. You enter your account username and password.

POP3: This is a protocol for fetching e?mail from a mail server. This method was designed to retrieve mail from a remote mail server and store the e?mail locally. Mail fetched via POP3 typically gets removed from a server once your e?mail client has fetched the mail (though you can change this behavior). Since mail is removed from the server, you typically can only read old mail in the e?mail program used to download the messages. If your mail server goes down, you will still be able to access old mail locally without an Internet connection.

POP?Before?SMTP Authentication: An alternative SMTP (send mail) authentication method. To use this method, you must log in to your e?mail account via POP3 and check your e?mail. If you do that successfully then you will be able to send e?mail from that account for 30 minutes via SMTP without having to enter the account username and password again. This is a somewhat less secure than password authentication and not all web hosts support it.

SMTP: Stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is the protocol used when you need to send someone e?mail from your account.

Web Mail (Client): A program that allows you to access your e?mail from a web browser.