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To send a message to another person, you have to have some way to identify
her to the person or organization delivering the message. This identification
is commonly called an address.
For electronic mail, an address is made up of at least the name of a
machine handling the person's mail, and a user identification recognized
by this system. This may be the recipient's login name, but may also
be anything else. Other mail addressing schemes, like X.400, use a
more general set of ``attributes'' which are used to look up the
recipient's host in an X.500 directory server.