Background Information
Ordinarily, the bounce address is not seen by e-mail users and, without standardization of the name, it may cause confusion. An e-mail message can be thought of as resembling a letter in an envelope. It will contain "header fields", such as To:, From:, and Subject:, along with the body of the message. These are analogous to the letterhead and body of a letter. The "to" and "from" information is usually copied to the envelope, and used to deliver the message.
While it is most common for the To and From information in the letter to be the same as on the envelope, such is not always the case. For example, on electronic mailing lists, the information seen in the "From:" header will come from the person who sent the e-mail to the list, while the bounce address will be set to that of the mailing list software, so problems delivering the mailing list messages can be handled correctly.
When e-mail is transported using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the most common method on the internet, only the envelope information is looked at to figure out where the e-mail should go; the body of the e-mail is not examined. Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) using the SMTP protocol use the RCPT TO command to determine where the e-mail should go, and the MAIL FROM command to indicate where it came from.
Read more about this topic: Bounce Address
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