what is the part of the email after the @ called
Email address An email address such as John.Smith@example.com is made up of a local-part, an @ symbol, then a case-insensitive domain. Although the standard specifies the local part to be case-sensitive, in practice the mail system at example.com may treat John.Smith as equivalent to JohnSmith or even as johnsmith,[1] and mail systems often limit their users' choice of name to a subset of the technically valid characters. In some cases they also limit which addresses it is possible to send mail to.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Email is submitted by a mail client (mail user agent, MUA) to a mail server (mail submission agent, MSA) using SMTP on TCP port 587. Most mailbox providers still allow submission on traditional port 25. The MSA delivers the mail to its mail transfer agent (mail transfer agent, MTA). Often, these two agents are instances of the same software launched with different options on the same machine. Local processing can be done either on a single machine, or split among multiple machines; mail agent processes on one machine can share files, but if processing is on multiple machines, they transfer messages between each other using SMTP, where each machine is configured to use the next machine as a smart host. Each process is an MTA (an SMTP server) in its own right.