E-mail

E-mail is an acronym for "Electronic Mail".

“E-mail is ‘comparable in principle to sending a first-class letter’. . . . Both the sender and the recipient have ‘an address (rather like a telephone number)’. . . . Such an e-mail address represents a individual user’s chosen identifying name at a particular computer system, for example, ‘mailbox-name@host.com,’. . . with the ‘host computer providing Internet services (“site”) [having] a unique Internet address which is an alphanumeric “domain name” [registered with] the Internet Network Information Center (“Internic”), a collaborative project established by the National Science Foundation.’”

“The analogy [to a letter] is not a perfect one, however, for two reasons. First, the sender directs his message to a logical rather than geographic address, and therefore need not know the location of his correspondent in real space. Second, most programs provide for a ‘reply’ option which enables the recipient to respond to the sender’s message simply by clicking on a button; the recipient will therefore not even need to type in the sender’s e-mail address. A further distinction concerns the level of security that protects a communication. While first-class letters are sealed, e-mail communications are more easily intercepted.