The Mail Delivery Agent reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

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).

This is the "Mail Delivery Agent" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.