Re: POP3 protocol question

[Steve Dorner <[e-mail]>]

At 9:01 PM 10/12/94, Mark Crispin wrote:
>Uh, excuse me.  The message header does not contain the correct list of
>recipients of the message except in the most trivial cases.  It absolutely
>does not in blind copies or groups.

XTND XMIT gets around the bcc thing by reading and then deleting the bcc:
header.

>c-client's SMTP code is less than 150 lines.

Depends on how you look at it.  If it weren't for SMTP, a simple POP client
could dispense with RFC 822 address parsing, which is probably a bit more
than 150 lines (I know my parser certainly is) even excluding comments and
copyright notices.

>Anyone who finds SMTP daunting is likely to find it even more daunting to
>implement RFC-822 and MIME correctly.

RFC 822 is really no big deal, *except* for the address parsing rules,
which are pretty bad.  Eliminate SMTP, and you eliminate much or all of the
need for parsing addresses.

MIME is yucky no matter how you slice it.

Of course, *all* of this pales in the face of doing a GUI, which so many of
us want to do nowadays.

Perhaps unlike Mark and Chris, I sympathize with the folks who want posting
in POP.  But, like Mark and Chris, I don't agree.

--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Incorporated
  Whosoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a
  debt of gratitude we owe to Adam.  He brought death into this world.
                                                                Mark Twain