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I noticed that gmail.com redirects to mail.google.com, is this because Google bought the domain and redirected it for people who made this assumption or is it because you can assign email addresses to domain names (or something along those lines)?
5ives
Posted 2012-11-17T22:58:12.777
Reputation: 11
0
xyz@googlemail.com accounts are being given the option to change to xyz@gmail.com accounts, which makes for shorter email addresses. Also, to answer your question, yes, the part behind the @ is usually the domain name.
Peter W.
Posted 2012-11-17T22:58:12.777
Reputation: 706
0
The gmail.com domain name serves (at least) two purposes:
it redirects browsers to mail.google.com - or, according to my quick test, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/
it receives and processes emails sent to <username>@gmail.com, which (usually) results in it ending up in the inbox for <username>'s account.
Having adopted the branding "Gmail", it makes sense for Google to purchase the domain name to allow messages to be sent to its users through @gmail.com addresses. And since it has the domain name, it might as well use it to redirect browsers to their mail.
Perhaps they could have used gmail.com directly, but they probably put it under the larger google.com umbrella to prevent it feeling isolated from other Google services.
mwfearnley
Posted 2012-11-17T22:58:12.777
Reputation: 5 885
So by default if you make an email service you have to assign it to a real domain name? Could it be an IP? – 5ives – 2012-11-17T23:03:57.157
According to Wikipedia (see "Email address"), you can use an IPv6-IP, but as you can probably imagine, a regular domain is easier to type. ;) – Peter W. – 2012-11-17T23:07:53.853
It might also be a pure IP address (
xyz@[203.0.113.2]), but IPv6 surely makes for shorter addresses. You can hardly beatxyz@[::1];) – Claudius – 2012-11-17T23:15:11.630