Domain name in the context of Authoritative name server

Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving digital messages using electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail (hence e- + mail). Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address (commonly local-part + @ + domain name) is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

Email operates across computer networks, primarily the Internet, and also local area networks. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface to send or receive messages or download it.

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.

Internet services typically provided by ISPs can include internet access, internet transit, domain name registration, web hosting, and colocation.

A web page (or webpage) is a Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of paper pages bound together into a book.

A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, commerce, entertainment, or social media. Hyperlinking between web pages guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page. The most-visited sites are Google, YouTube, and Facebook.

All publicly-accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web. There are also private websites that can only be accessed on a private network, such as a company's internal website for its employees. Users can access websites on a range of devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The app used on these devices is called a web browser.

Britannica.com is the domain name of the main website of Encyclopædia Britannica, which provides partial free access to the paid online edition of the encyclopaedia, titled Encyclopaedia Britannica. The paid edition is known as Britannica Academic, previously Britannica Online.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names (identification strings) assigned to each of the associated entities. Most prominently, it translates readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols. The Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985.

The Domain Name System delegates the responsibility of assigning domain names and mapping those names to Internet resources by designating authoritative name servers for each domain. Network administrators may delegate authority over subdomains of their allocated name space to other name servers. This mechanism provides distributed and fault-tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database. In addition, the DNS specifies the technical functionality of the database service that is at its core. It defines the DNS protocol, a detailed specification of the data structures and data communication exchanges used in the DNS, as part of the Internet protocol suite.

An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.

An email address, such as john.smith@example.com, is made up from a local-part, the symbol @, and a domain, which may be a domain name or an IP address enclosed in brackets. Although the standard requires the local-part to be case-sensitive, it also urges that receiving hosts deliver messages in a case-independent manner, e.g., that the mail system in the domain example.com treat John.Smith as equivalent to john.smith; some mail systems even treat them as equivalent to johnsmith. Mail systems often limit the users' choice of name to a subset of the technically permitted characters; with the introduction of internationalized domain names, efforts are progressing to permit non-ASCII characters in email addresses.

MSN is a web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps provided by Microsoft. The main home page provides news, weather, sports, finance and other content curated from hundreds of different sources that Microsoft has partnered with. MSN is based in the United States and offers international versions of its portal for dozens of countries around the world. Its dedicated app is currently available for iOS and Android systems.

The first version of MSN originally launched on August 24, 1995, with the release of Windows 95, as a subscription-based dial-up online service called The Microsoft Network; it later became an Internet service provider named MSN Dial-Up Internet Access. Also around this time, the company launched a new web portal named Microsoft Internet Start and set it as the default home page of Internet Explorer, its web browser. In 1998, Microsoft renamed and moved this web portal to the domain name msn.com, where it has remained since.

A domain name registrar is a company, person, or office that manages the reservation of Internet domain names.

A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) registry or a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) registry. A registrar operates in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries. As of March 2024, there are 2,800 domain name registrars accredited by ICANN.

A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain. For example, if the domain is example.com, the home page is likely located at the URL www.example.com/.

The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application first opens.