Twisted Network Programming Essentials, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Twisted Mail

Twisted comes with support for building clients and servers for the three big email protocols in common use today: SMTP, IMAP, and POP3.

Each of these protocols has a lot of components and is meticulously documented in multiple RFCs; covering the ins and outs of mail servers and clients could be a book in and of itself. The goal for this chapter is instead to give you broad-strokes familiarity with the protocols and the APIs Twisted provides for them, through some simple but runnable and tinker-friendly examples. By the end, you should have a good idea of what you’d need to do to build arbitrary email applications in Twisted.

To describe in brief the main uses for each of these protocols:

SMTP

SMTP, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, is for sending mail; when you send an e-mail from the Gmail web interface, your Thunderbird desktop app, or the mail app on your smartphone, that message is probably getting sent over SMTP.

IMAP

IMAP, the Internet Message Access Protocol, is used for remote access, storage, and management of email messages. Remote management makes it easy to read and send mail from more than one place. The fact that you see the same messages on your phone, web interface, and desktop app is probably because your email provider is using IMAP for remote management.

POP3

POP3, the Post Office Protocol version 3, is an older and simpler protocol than IMAP, but still prevalent. POP3 does one thing, and does it well: it allows a user to log into a mail server ...