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Electronic mail (or e-mail or email) is the most widely used service offered by the Internet today. it allows those people who have an e-mail address to send and receive electronic letters. Those are much like postal letters, except that they are delivered much faster than snail mail when sending over long distances, and is usually free. To send or receive an email, a computer with a modem and telephone line connected to the Internet, and an e-mail program (simply called mailer) are required. Several formats exist for email addresses. The most common, called RFC 2822 looks like user@domain.tld. E-mail messages are sent mostly by text, and sometimes by HTML style.
Like with regular mail, users may get a lot of unwanted mail. With e-mail, this is called spam. Some programs used for sending and receiving mail can detect spam and filter it out completely.
Some companies let you send and receive emails for free from a remote website. Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! do this kind of service: known as "web mail".
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- RFC 2822 Internet Message Format. April 2001
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