Email this page to a friend

Message Transfer Agent

<messaging> (MTA, Mail Transport Agent) The program responsible for delivering e-mail messages.

Upon receiving a message from a Mail User Agent or another MTA it stores it temporarily locally and analyses the recipients and either delivers it (local addressee) or forwards it to another MTA (routing).

In either case it may edit and/or add to the message headers.

The most widely used MTA for Unix is sendmail, which communicates using SMTP.

[Other OSes?]

< Previous Terms	Terms Containing Message Transfer Agent	Next Terms >
message digest function Message Handling System message passing Message Passing Interface message switching	electronic mail Mail Transport Agent mail user agent MTA sendmail	Messaging Application Programming Interface Messaging Applications Programming Interface mess-dos META meta