However, there's often more than one person living in one house, so postal letters aren't just addressed to the home address - they're also addressed to an individual person. In the case of your computer, there are usually several programs that are listening for data. In the case of the Internet, data is sent not just to an address, but also to an individual port. Only one program can listen on any one port. For example, if a web server is listening on port 80, no other programs can listen on that port while the web server is using it. If data is sent to port 80, the web server listening on port 80 then receives the data.

If Alice wishes to connect to Bob's computer, she needs to know the address of Bob's computer. Once she knows Bob's address she can try to connect a program on her computer to a program on Bob's computer. To do this, Alice must know which port to connect to. For example, if Bob has a program listening on port 100, then Alice needs to configure her program so that it connects to Bob's computer on port 100. Fortunately, finding the port to use is rarely an issue - most servers use static ports. For example, web servers nearly always listen on port 80, so if Alice is using a web browser (such as Internet Explorer), her software automatically knows to connect on port 80.

Port Explorer allows you to see all the connections and ports on your system, including which processes are using which ports, and which remote computers are connected to your system. It allows you to close established connections, gives you the ability to prevent a process or socket from sending and/or receiving data, and even allows you to spy on the data being sent and received. 

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