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Using e-mail

Addressing mail to users on other systems

If your SCO OpenServer system is part of a network, you can send mail to users on other systems on the network. However, you need to know how to specify the name of the system to which your mail will be delivered.

You can send mail on your local network or over large area networks across an interconnected world-wide network of computer systems known as the Internet, represented here figuratively:

The Internet is divided into a series of ``domains'' -- groups of sites identified by some collective attribute. For example, the domains in the United States include gov (government), com (commercial), mil (military), and edu (educational). Many computers in other countries are on the Internet, at sites in the United Kingdom and Russia, for example.

Each domain is divided into hierarchies of subdomains that may have an arbitrary number of levels. The lowest level subdomain is may be an individual computer name, an organization name, or the name of a division within an organization. Domains usually do not specify a machine name since this may very likely change; instead mail that arrives at an organization is redistributed locally between users on different host computers. When you receive a message from someone on a remote system, the domain of the sender appears to the right of the ``@'' character on the ``From'' line. For example:

   From: andrea@scribe.npr.com
is a message from andrea in the subdomain scribe belonging to the company identified by the subdomain npr in the domain com. The whole address is known as a ``fully qualified domain name''.

Depending on how your system administrator has configured mail on your system, you only need to state the login in the ``To'' field. Alternatively, you may need to specify a full domain name, for example:

   To: andrea
instead of
   To: andrea@scribe.npr.com
You can set up aliases for such mail addresses using the alias command in your .mailrc file as described in ``Making mail execute commands at startup''.
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© 2003 Caldera International, Inc. All rights reserved.
SCO OpenServer Release 5.0.7 -- 11 February 2003