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, "mail" is the most popular MDA.
See also:
mail user agent (MUA).
