In computing, a user agent is software (a software agent) that is acting on behalf of a user. For example, an email reader is a mail user agent, and in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the term user agent refers to both end points of a communications session. In many cases, a user agent acts as a client in a network protocol used in communications within a client–server distributed computing system. In particular, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) identifies the client software originating the request, using a “User-Agent” header, even when the client is not operated by a user. The SIP protocol (based on HTTP) followed this usage.