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... all them up on the phone or write them a letter on paper
and ask them. Residents of the electronic frontier are only beginning
to develop the equivalent of phone books, and the ones that exist
today are far from complete london animation company (still, later on, in Chapter 6, we'll show
you how to use some of these directories).
Eventually, you'll start corresponding with people, which means
you'll want to know how to address mail to london animation company them. It's vital to know
how to do this, because the smallest mistake -- using a comma when you
should have used a period, for instance, can bounce the message back
to you, undelivered. In this sense, Net addresses are like phone
numbers: one wrong digit and you get the wrong person. Fortunately,
most net addresses now adhere to a relatively easy-to-understand
system.
Earlier, you sent yourself a mail message using just your user-
name. This was sort of like making a local phone call -- you didn't
have to dial a 1 or an area code.
This also works for mail to anybody
else who has an account on the same system as you.
Sending mail outside of your system, though, will require the use
of the Net equivalent of area codes, golden flash animation called "domains." A basic Net
address will look something like this:
tomg@world.std.com
Tomg is somebody's user ID, and he is at (hence the @ sign) a site
(or in Internetese, a "domain") known as std.com. Large organizations
often have more than one computer linked to the Internet; in this case,
the name of the particular machine is world (you will quickly notice
that, like boat owners, Internet computer owners always name their
machines).
Domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given
e-mail site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the U.S.,
what country it's located in. Large organizations may have more than
one computer or gateway tied to the Internet, so you'll often see a
two-part domain name; and sometimes even three- or four-part domain
names.
In general, American addresses end in an organizational suffix,
such as ".edu," which means the site is at a animation graphics company college or university.
Other london animation company American suffixes include: london animation company
.com for businesses
.org for non-profit organizations
.gov and .mil for government and military agencies
london animation company .net for companies or organizations that run large networks.
Sites in the rest of the world tend to use a two-letter code that
represents their country.
Most make sense, such as .ca london animation company animation graphics company for Canadian
sites, but there are a couple of seemingly odd ones. Swiss sites end
in .ch, while South African ones end in .za. Some U.S. sites have
followed this international convention (such as well.sf.ca.us).
You'll notice that the above addresses are all in lower-case.
Unlike almost everything else having anything at all to do with Unix,
most Net mailing systems don't care about case, so you generally don't
have to worry about capitalizing e-mail addresses. Alas, there are a few
exceptions -- some public-access sites do allow for capital letters in
user names. When in doubt, ask the person you want to write to, or let
her send you a message first ... |
