On Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:44:38 -0800 (PST) Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> 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.
Mmmhhh... "Managing IMAP", by D and K Mullet, does have a short
and well-understandable introduction on internet mail. It does
not cover all your topics, though, and it's not online. I guess
the soon-to-ship exim book will also have a nice introduction on
internet mail.
Your efforts would of course be welcome, I'm sure :-))
> 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).
(...)
Bernard Stern, SWITCH
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