Chapter 12. E-mail Composition and Decoding

The early e-mail protocols were among the first network dialects developed for the Internet. The world was a simple one in those days: everyone with access to the Internet reached it through a command-line account on an Internet-connected machine. There, at the command line, they would type out e-mails to their friends, and then they could check their in-boxes when new mail arrived. The entire task of an e-mail protocol was to transmit messages from one big Internet server to another, whenever someone sent mail to a friend whose shell account happened to be on a different machine.

Today the situation is much more complicated: not only is the network involved in moving e-mail between servers, but it is ...

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