Mail Delivery Agent
Encyclopedia : M : MA : MAI : Mail Delivery Agent
A Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) is software that accepts incoming e-mail messages and distributes them to recipients' individual mailboxes (if the destination account is on the local machine), or forwards back to an SMTP server (if the destination is on a remote server).
A mail delivery agent is not necessarily a mail transfer agent (MTA), although on many systems the two functions are implemented by the same program.
On unix systems, /bin/mail is the most popular MDA.
See also: mail user agent (MUA).
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