On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> Without being more than usually rude, we seem to be getting a very high
> proportion of requests on the list now showing a complete ignorance of
> even basic mail handling. The internet is doomed - abondon network now.
It's time for someone to write a "HOWTO Understand mail transport" which
we can point people to as well as to The Fine Manual. Maybe next week
I'll start something like that. But if people know of an existing
document that would be far better than relying on me to do anything at
all.
The document should NOT be about configuring any MTA, but cover concepts.
What comes to mind as topics are:
(1) MTA versus MUA
(2) Envelope vs Header
(3) Mail access (IMAP, POP3, HTTP, etc) vs Mail Transport
(4) Bounces
(b) Warnings
(4*) Received: lines
(5) MTA vs/with MDA
(6) ESMTP vs SMTP
(7) How mailing lists work
(8) How autoresponder ought to work
(9) spam (this section will just be pointers to other documents)
(a) open relays.
(10) Duplication of messages (common causes).
Ooops. This is getting too ambitous. I'd better scale it down, or hope
that someone else will write it. After all, I'm too lazy to renumber
after I added 4* to the list.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg
I have recently moved, see
http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/contact.html
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
