What's a mailbox?
Many people ask us the difference between a
- mailbox
- mail mapping
- mail redirection
- mail forwarding
The bottom three are different terms for the same thing - the mail is not
stored on the server but forwarded, redirected or mapped to a mailbox that
exists to collect your mail.
A mailbox accepts email sent to it and stores the email until you come
along and say "Send me all my mail". Every mailbox has a unique identifier
(username) which enables you to retrieve your mail.
You can have a single mailbox set up to collect your mail but have
multiple email addresses which forward mail to your mailbox. For example I
could have a mailbox with Xtra to take advantage of their SPAM filtering -
say this mailbox is called spiralmail and I can send mail to it via
spiralmail@xtra.co.nz. We have our own domain name so I can set up
audrey@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
info@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
sales@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey.shearer@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey@spiralwebdesign.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey@spiralweb.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
etc
This provides me with many different email addresses yet keeps it simple
for picking up my mail.
While we are on mail - What's POP?
Local e-mail clients use the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3 or just
POP). This is an application-layer Internet standard protocol, to retrieve
e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. Nearly all subscribers
to individual Internet service provider e-mail accounts access their e-mail
with client software that uses POP3.
You can read more about email on
Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail
© Spiral Web Design Limited
September 2006
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