 Let's talk about email addresses a little bit. You would think this would be a simple conversation, but it obviously confuses some people. I just finished recording a video, which I probably posted a day or two ago, talking about confusing terms and how we use terms improperly all the time and makes conversations easier. But then when you get technical, it confuses things. In an email address, almost everything in the virtual world has a relation to something in the real world, and if you actually look at those relationships, it can make things simpler, but then people get confused still. So let's talk about an address. So we're talking about email addresses. An email address will have a name, and it will also have the little at symbol, and then it will also have a domain. So a domain is an address. For example, filmsbychrist.com. Filmsbychrist.com tells you, you ask a server, bring me to filmsbychrist.com, and it says, okay, so that basically is a pointer to an IP address, which is another address. So filmsbychrist.com might lead you to address 1.2.3.4. It's not going to be the address, but it could be something like that. And that number points to a server that's in a physical location. And that's when address is, in the real world, an address is not a location. I'm in my house. My house has an address where my house is is not the address. It's the location. The address tells you how to get to that location. You use that address to find a location. And I think that's what's confusing for people. The domain is not where something is. It's telling you, well, a domain is telling you where the IP address is, and the IP address is telling you where the server is. Because I can go right now in a couple seconds, just say, okay, this is my domain. I'm going to switch it over to this IP, which points to a whole other server. And that server can be on the other side of the world. And the domain hasn't changed, but the location has. And your phone, your computer's at home, their IP address has changed all the time, but their locations don't. There's computers to keep track of this IP. This address points to this location. When your IP changes, those tables up on those servers update, and it goes to here. So the domain part of an email address, so the part after the, or the, filmsbychrist.com, the google.com, the yahoo.com is the domain basically telling your email where to go. It goes, oh, it's this domain, it's that IP address, that address, the server is over here. That first part of that is who it goes to at that server. So picture this, you're a company or an apartment building. A company I think is a better example of this. I send, or even your house, I can send something to your address and it has a name and you know who in the house that goes to, that's what that first part of it is. And the same could be done, you know, in a company. You send it to this building and then employees probably have their own little mailboxes, either all in one room or on their desk and someone goes around and delivers it from the mail room. So again, the filmsbychrist.com, the app part, after the app signing, that's where it's going and the first part is who it's going to. Now just like in real life you can do forwardings. So for example, I help someone set up an email address that forwards to another account of theirs. So all their email, it goes to the server and then goes to their account somewhere else and you can do the same thing in real life. So I can mail you a letter to your office and you can have multiple people in that office again. So again, let's do filmsbychrist.com. We got Bob, we got Tom, then we got Tim. I send an email and first the email application goes, okay, it goes to the server, it goes to filmsbychrist.com. I'm sending it to that server. Once it gets to that server, the server goes, oh, that's to Bob. I'm going to put this in Bob's mailbox. Oh, that goes to Tom. I'm going to put that in Tom's mailbox. Oh, this goes to Tim. I'm going to put that in Tim's mailbox. And I can also set up forwarding to where on the server side, when it goes to Bob, maybe as the person who runs that site, I want a copy of that going to Bob, but I also want it going to Tim. So Tim will get every email Bob gets. So the server knows when an email comes in to Bob, I'm going to send it to Bob and I'm going to send it to Tim. That's the same thing on that. That's the same thing in office. When this comes in, I mean, it's a little different with paper. Oh, I'm going to copy this and give a copy to somebody else, and that's the carbon copy to CC is, you know, like old school carbon copy papers. But it can go someplace else. Let's say Bob and Tom and Tim are all working at the same location for this corporation. But then Bob gets moved to another location, still works for the same company. So he's, let's say he's still in the same building, but he gets moved upstairs. It can now get forwarded upstairs, or like I said, he can go to a whole another location for this building and it can get transferred over there. So I can have the email come in and the email go, oh, well, he's at another server now. I can send it over to his server. So I'm trying to think of a good example of this, but let's just say, just an example, but let's say I also have a Gmail account or Yahoo account, whichever, I'm not trying to pick any company in particular. I can have my emails come in and I can have them go to a mailbox on my server and to Gmail or just come up and go straight to Gmail. I don't even have to store any of the mailboxes on my server if I don't want to. And this is what's confused someone that I've helped set up this email account for. He has a forwarding email address, but he refers to it as not a real email address. Well, it is a real email address, just like the address if I was to mail a paper letter to somebody, it would go to where it's supposed to go and it might get forwarded somewhere else, but that doesn't make that address not a real address. It might point to a different location now, though. It might get, it not just point to a different location, we're forwarding it so, again, it comes into one building, they go, oh, they're sorting through the mail, they go, oh, he's moved over here, they put it in the outgoing mail and it goes somewhere else. That's what mail forwarding is. Again, you can make copy and have one copy here and go here, you can have as many as you want. And as someone who runs a web server, or sorry, an email server, I can set up as many emails just as I want. I mean, literally, as I go into a text file and on the server and I say, okay, I need an email address for Alice, so I say any email that starts off with Alice for this domain, so it's coming into this, it's already at this computer, Alice. And I can just list different mailboxes. So I can just say Alice and I can say Alice and if I just leave Alice, it goes to the mailbox on this server labeled Alice, wherever that's set up to be, usually in their home folder or in a different, you know, folder somewhere else. But I can say Alice, Alice, and it will go there and then after that, I can just do space Alice at gmail.com and now it will go to Alice on this computer, but forward to Alice at gmail.com and it's very easy to set these up. You can just list as many as you want. And that makes it very simple for you to make, if you own a domain, which only costs a few dollars a year, maybe 10, 15 dollars a year, most, for most domains, you can get them cheaper and sometimes they can be more expensive. You have virtually unlimited email addresses. I'm sure there's a character limit. You can't have more than 52 characters in the email address or something like that. I don't know what the number is. I'm just making a number up here. This makes it very easy for you to sort through your mail. It's something I do quite often. So let's say I go to Joe's Mechanic Shop and they want my email address. I literally can open up a text file on my server. I can do it on my phone and I just say Joe's Mechanic Shop 123 and then I say Chris. And what that will do is I just create a new email address. It's now Joe's Mechanic Shop 123 at whatever my domain is, minefilmsrightchris.com, and it will dump it into whatever mailbox I specify, Chris in this case. Or I can say chris.gmail.com and it will go to chris.gmail.com or I can have it go to multiple places. This is great to do this because you can now filter through it. They're all going to the same mailbox but they're coming at different things and I can say okay, I can filter them into different folders, I can have them go to different mailboxes and if I start getting spam from them or if their accounts get hacked and now some vicious hackers start spamming me because they have my email address I can just turn that email address off. You can do the same thing with what's called a catchall. If you have an email server you can say okay, anything that comes in that isn't a specified email box, dump into whatever box this is. That's you're going to get who, not a spam, because people will just send, when they find a web server or a domain they just send whatever they'll send it to support at filmsrightchris.com. Sometimes there's random numbers, blah, blah, blah, filmsrightchris.com, so you might want to dump those someplace or just block them, it's up to you but you wouldn't want to have that going to your main account. But again, it's very easy to open up a text file and say, it depends on what email server you're using but usually it's just you give it the name, the first part before the ad symbol and then where you want it to go, you just list email addresses or mailboxes on the local machine, you can list a bunch of them and they all, right away they come in and they go out. So basically what I'm saying is an email address is a very easy thing to change and it's just telling something where something should go so and you can change it literally like that and you can create ones like that if you have a server. Having outgoing mail coming from your server, that takes a bit more, probably not the best idea but having incoming mail server, super simple to set up and it gives you so much control to filter and control stuff but again the guy that I helped with his email, I hate that he calls it a fake email address. It is 100% affording email addresses just as real as any other, just as if I set up a forwarding that when a letter comes in it goes someplace else that's still an address. It may just be forwarding somewhere but it's still a real address, it works just like a real address. That's it. But if you don't do your own email stuff, there are certain things you probably, running your own email server in some aspects is a bad idea. Again, if you're trying to set up to where you're sending stuff out from your server, it's going to get blocked by a lot of spam, takes a lot of maintenance but to have stuff coming into your server and then filtering it out from there, super useful and highly recommend it. That's it. Thanks for watching and hope you have a great day.