What is an E-mail?
An e-mail (short for electronic mail) is a message that is sent from one e-mail address (such as [email protected]) to another e-mail address. The term e-mail may also refer to an e-mail address: "what is your e-mail?" means "what is your e-mail address," while "do you have e-mail?" can mean either if you have an e-mail address at all, or if you have received any e-mail messages that you haven't read.
To have an e-mail, to have an e-mail address, and to be able to send and receive e-mail messages, you must sign up with an e-mail provider.
A popular, free e-mail provider is Google Mail, a service provided by Google. Google Mail is also known as GMail, due to its domain name being gmail.com. If you ever see an e-mail address such as [email protected], that is a Google Mail address.
The part before the at (@) is the username of someone who has an account at that e-mail provider. This username isn't shared between providers: [email protected] is not the same person as [email protected].
It's possible for a single user at an e-mail provider to have multiple e-mail addresses. This means that e-mail sent to different addresses all go to the same inbox. For example, in GMail, [email protected] and [email protected] both are addresses that send e-mail to John's inbox (same as [email protected]). Other providers may not offer this functionality. In paid providers, you can often have several completely different e-mail addresses.
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