Programming Internet Email

Preface

To paraphrase an old Saturday Night Live skit, “The Internet has been very, very good to me.” The more I use it, the more I realize that my use centers around electronic mail. Although I surf the Web, use Usenet newsgroups, transfer files, and conference with others regularly, it is a rare day that doesn’t involve email. Email keeps me in touch with friends overseas, lets me conduct business, documents my workday, and generally keeps me on track. Email is the Internet’s “killer app” and now defines much of my communication with others. This book is more about giving back to the community that serves me so well than it is about anything else.

This book is a desktop quick reference for programmers working with Internet electronic mail. It also serves as a tutorial for those interested in learning more about the internal workings of the Internet mail system. It was written primarily because I needed it. I could not find adequate information elsewhere on Internet email in a reasonably compact form.

Until this publication, one had to read rather academic-sounding Internet Requests for Comments in order to learn about email on the Net. Hopefully, this book will allow people to learn about the Internet mail system without having to learn the Augmented Backus-Naur Form meta-language common in the standards. I’ve also included some pretty pictures.

Within these pages are email formats, protocols, APIs, and examples. While not exactly ships and shoes and sealing wax, they should be enough to teach novices and provide a handy reference to daily coders. The formats show how email messages and mailboxes are formatted in text. The protocols illustrate how email services communicate to pass messages, and the APIs provide code libraries in Perl and Java so that you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. The examples show how to work with email to enhance your daily life or expand the capabilities of a program.