An electronic mail message consists of two parts: the headers and the body. The body comes after the headers and consists of the "message": whatever the sender types in. The headers are the lines at the top of the message including the subject and addresses of the people to whom the message is addressed. It is similar to the top lines of a memo -- To:, From:, Subject:, and so on. The headers are separated from the body by a blank line. As in memos, the people listed in the Cc: field are not intended to be the primary recipients of the message. The message is for their information only, and they are not expected to reply.
An electronic mail address looks like "name@site". The name is a person's "mail handle" -- often his first initial followed by his last name. For example, John Smith's mail handle is "jsmith". The site is the system where the addressee receives mail. At UCI, most mail handles are defined as "name@uci.edu".
At UCI we use the MH mail system. MH differs from ordinary mail systems in that instead of running one large program which handles all mail functions and keeps messages in one large file, MH is a collection of smaller single-purpose programs used to manipulate mail messages which are kept in individual files. MH has been designed to allow you to take full advantage of existing Unix commands and programs in connection with mail messages. For example, you can use your usual text editor, spelling program, and printer commands on individual messages.