The Mail transfer agent reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Mail transfer agent

A mail transfer agent or MTA (also commonly called a mail server) is a computer program or software agent which transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. The MTA works behind the scenes, while the user usually interacts with another program, the mail user agent (MUA), which contacts an MTA for actual delivery of the mail.

The delivery of email to a user's mailbox typically takes place via a mail delivery agent (MDA); many MTAs have basic MDA functionality built in, but a dedicated MDA like procmail can provide more sophistication.

The sendmail program, which implements the standard SMTP mail transfer protocol, has become a very widely used MTA. The Microsoft Exchange Server contains an MTA as well. Other MTAs include qmail, Postfix, Exim, Courier and ZMailer.

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

See also

• List of mail servers

---

MTA as an abbreviation can have other meanings: see the MTA disambiguation page.

This is the "Mail transfer agent" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.