Email

Email is the most popular service on the internet.

In fact, it’s now estimated that more than 60 billion emails are sent each day, or almost 22 trillion each year (that’s more than 3,300 per person). Of course, it is also estimated that up to 80 per cent of these emails are spam.

Referring to a system of writing and sending messages over electronic communications systems, email was first available in 1965 as a way for people sharing time on the same mainframe computer to communicate – long before the web or other internet services came to be.

Parts of an email address

An email address commonly consists of three parts.

username@domain.com.au

Starting from the right, the domain name (domain.com.au) is used to relate an email address to a physical machine. Each domain is ‘hosted’ at a particular computer and can be found using the Domain Name System (DNS), just like a website on the world-wide-web.

The part to the left (username) is where the name of the user goes. This allows the system to direct the email to the correct person at a domain.

The @ symbol, or ‘at’ in the middle is a shorthand way of relating a username to a domain. The combination of the username and domain are unique. The @ symbol was introduced in 1971 to allow people to send emails to people on different computers via networks such as the internet.