E-mail Electronic mail. Text messages sent from one person to another person, on the same or different computer systems. Electronic envelope Catch-all term for the electronic address, communications transport protocols, and control information. It is the electronic analogy of a paper envelope, i.e., a communications package. The place where EDI transmission is stored for pickup or delivery within a third party service provider's system.
Trading partners can also maintain mailboxes within their own domain.
Encryption A process of transforming clear text into ciphertext for security or privacy reasons. Functional acknowledgement A message or transaction set transmitted by the receiver of an EDI transaction to the sender, indicating receipt and syntactical acceptability of data transmitted according to an EDI standard. The functional acknowledgement allows the receiving party to report back to the sending party problems encountered by the syntax analyzer as the data is interpreted. It is not intended to serve as an acknowledgement of data content. A group of one or more messages or transaction sets bounded by a functional group header segment and a functional group trailer segment.