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- address book
- a small database in which you store email addresses for the individuals
and groups that you correspond with, each labeled with an easy to remember
nickname. Each of the ACCC-upported email clients support address books, but,
unfortunately, they all use their own formats for these addressbooks. The
ACCC Address Book Conversion Utility
solves that problem; it converts address books from one format to another.
Inbox- All email programs provide an Inbox, a special mail folder or mailbox that
holds your incoming mail messages. Your email program will allow you to read,
reply to, save, or delete the messages in your Inbox.
email account, email maildrop, and POP account - Traditionally, an email account is a computer on which you receive mail
and an id that identifies your account on that computer. Maildrop is a newer
term that means pretty much the same thing as email account. POP account is
also similar, but a bit more specific -- it says that you'll use a POP server
to retrieve your incoming mail. (Eudora talks about "your POP account" in
its manuals and online helps.) Of these, maildrop seems to be more general.
("Email account" implies a mainframe approach -- login to your email account
and do mail -- and POP isn't the only type of remote email server.)
- These days, an email account might be just that -- an account that only
gives you a maildrop for incoming mail, without a standard computer account
that you can "login to." The ACCC's mailserv
machine is like that. In the UNIX world, the "login to and do computer-type
stuff on" type of account is called a UNIX shell account. Accounts
on tigger and icarus
are UNIX shell accounts, which may also server as your maildrop.
email address - has the form "person id" at "domain id." For example, the email address
of my account on tigger is judygs@tigger.cc.uic.edu. In this email address,
I am identified by my tigger login id, judygs, and tigger is identified by
its Internet domain name, tigger.cc.uic.edu.
- It's tempting to think that the "person id" part of an email address has
to be some person's login id on some computer and the "domain id" has to be
that computer's Internet domain name. That is often the case, but not always.
Consider the perfectly valid email address: consult@uic.edu. "Consult" is
neither a person nor a login id. "uic.edu" is a computer, but neither consult
nor anyone else who uses a "netid@uic.edu" email address has an account on
that computer.
email program - the program or package that you use to read and reply to, save or delete
incoming mail messages, and to send mail messages of your own. Mail programs
are called "user agents" in the official descriptions of MIME -- Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions. (See Making
Email Talk in the September/October 1996 issue of The ADN Connection.)
The ACCC recommends three email programs -- Eudora
(for Windows and the Mac), WebMail, for
Web browsers, and Pine (for UNIX).
mail folders and mailboxes - places where your mail program stores email messages. Pine calls them mail
folders; Eudora calls them mailboxes. Most people save their mail in different
mail folders depending on topic, correspondent, date, or other categories.
Modern email programs generally provide the same services (read, reply, save,
or delete) to other mail folders that they provide for the Inbox.
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