< 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?]
(1997-02-28)