What is an email address? Everything you should know about an email address

In the era of technology 4.0, almost everyone owns at least one email address for communication, work exchange with colleagues and friends. Moreover, an email address is necessary information when you register accounts on forums, social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, ... or even when you sign up for an account on e-commerce sites like Tiki, Lazada, ... So what is an email address? Let's find out.

I. What is an email address?

An email address, or E-mail, is an abbreviation of the phrase in English - Electronic Mail, translating into a mailbox. Simply put, an email address is a mailbox used to receive and send mail over the internet.

The advent of email holds significant meaning. Instead of going to the post office to send a letter and wait for a response, just like in the past, you just need to sit at home and use email to send and receive messages to get the necessary exchange of information.

II. Components of an Email Address

To understand more about email addresses, you need to know what components are in an email address. Let's analyze the email address below.

Take the email address [email protected] and we break it down into the following components:

• .com: represents a second-level domain, besides .com, there are .org, .edu, .net, and several other domain names.  Furthermore, if you encounter domain names like .vn, .us then these are top-level domain names divided by country code. To understand more about domain names, you can refer to the article What is a domain name?
• gmail: is the name of the mail service, in some other cases, this component could be the name of an organization, business, many units use the domain name of the website as an email address. For example: [email protected], ...
• @: is the part connecting the username and the domain.
• username: personal username or possibly the name of a company.

III. The significance of an Email Address

Using an email address brings many benefits such as:

• Enhance work productivity: Typically, The email will be attached with a calendar, directory, instant messaging, so users can track the schedule, exchange work quickly to accelerate the working process.
• Authenticate and secure web service accounts: When you register accounts like Facebook, Shopee, ... all need an email address to authenticate and ensure safety.
• Easily manage work: When using email, you are allowed to create files, attach labels, prioritize, arrange groups, filter junk mail, divide mail by folders easily, conveniently for managing and arranging work.
• Privacy: Any information you exchange in the mail will be kept confidential.
• Communicate with many people: You can send an email to many people at the same time with just a few simple steps.
• Access email address at any time: You don't need to go far, just have an Internet connection and you can access your email address to check the mail or send an email to others.

IV. How to own an Email Address?

You can be granted an email address from Internet service providers, your company or school where you work or you can register an email address through free email services like Gmail, Outlook.com, iCloud, ...

Besides you may create your own domain name and set up an email address of your choice on that domain.

On fact, almost everyone owns multiple email accounts to serve different purposes such as work, entertainment, service provision, advertising, etc. While using multiple email accounts, you can divide communication in each area of life is separated, however, you should not own too many as this may cause you to miss important information due to a lack of thorough mailbox checking.