The Unix world has a straightforward system of electronic mail addressing. As you will remember, mailing someone on a local system is done by typing
Mail username
To mail someone on another machine on your network, type
Mail username@machine-name
To mail someone on a machine on another, connected network, type
Mail username@machine-name.connected-network-name
The connected-network-name above is called a domain,
and there may be any number of these. For example, an E-mail address could
be
mary@vax.oxford.ac.uk
The machine called VAX is in the domain called oxford,
which is in the domain ac, (i.e. academic community) .
Note, the command Mail uses a very simple editor, on OUCS
Unix systems there are other more user-friendly commands available, for
example pine, elm (see the man pages for more
information). Note also, that often someone's email address will not be
of the above format but non-machine specific, for example,
firstname.surname@department.universityname.ac.uk