## 2 Mailbox ¶

The principal object Mailutils operates on is mailbox – a collection of mail messages. The two main characteristics of a mailbox are its type and path. The type defines how the messages are stored within a mailbox. The path specifies the location of the mailbox. The two characteristics are usually combined within a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which uniquely identifies the mailbox. The syntax for URL is:

    type:[//[user:password@]host[:port]]path[?query][;params]

The square brackets do not appear in a URL, instead they are used to denote optional parts.

Not all parts are meaningful for all types. Their usage and purpose are described in the sections that follow.