The next diagram shows how a user in the USA send a mail to an user in the
Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Madras. The user, from
her home at USA, dials up (2400 bytes per second line) to a workstation in a
university, writes and sends the message. The workstation send the mail, via a 2
Mbps line, to JVC net, a provider of Internet services. From there, a connection
via satellite is made to the Software Technology Park, in Bangalore. There, the
mail is forwarded to the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, via another satellite
connection. Finally, the user in the Theoretical Physics Department of the
University of Madras, dias up to IMSc, and collects his mail.
The hosts of the Internet have names assigned to them in a structured way. The
convention used is known as DNS, Domain Name System. A person with
access to a machine or network, will have a user name in that system. The user
name, together with the host/network name, forms the e-mail address of the
person. For example, rahul@imsc.res.in is the e-mail address of a person with
user name "rahul", in the domain "imsc.res.in" This last name contains quite
some information: it is divided in several subdomains: "imsc", which is the
domain that identifies all the machines in the Institute of Mathematical
Sciences, and "ernet", the Educational and Research Network in India. Finally,
the address ends with the domain that identifies the country, in this example
"in" for India. So we can see that the structure of the e-mail address of the
typical Internet user is
account@[subdomain].[subdomain]...domain
The domain is the right most label, and they are organized in a very well-
specified and regulated system. The domains in the USA are gov, edu, arpa,
com, mil, org and net. Outside the USA, each nation has a domain assigned to
it, e.g. in=India, es=Spain, fr=France, etc. Within a nation there might be
several subdomains, like "ac" for academic institutions in the uk (United
Kingdom) domain. The following picture shows an example of domain
structure.
Domain structure within India