1. By Won Lee

2.  Stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol  Used for sending and receiving electronic mail efficiently and reliably  Daily function of life  Used daily by the billions

3.  SMTP outgrew others in 1970’s.  Jonathan Postel wrote the SMTP definition in August 1982.  Documented under Request for Comments (RFC) 821  Used by small collection of military, universities, and corporate research laboratories.  Connections were slow and unreliable but was only used by a handful of people.

4.  Number of hosts were recognizable by each other.  Focused on Reliability rather then Security.  People helped by configuring system to “open relay”.  Meaning a configured host would accept any mail meant for other systems and relay it to the mail’s final destination.  First spam in 1978 by Salesman from DEC

5.  SMTP mail transaction is a text-based protocol that is done in three steps.  Firstly, the transaction starts with a MAIL command that gives the sender identification.  Followed by a series of one or more RCPT commands, giving the receiver information.  Finally, a DATA command initiates transfer of the mail data and is terminated by the “end of mail” data indicator, which also confirms the transaction.  SMTP is mainly delivery protocol and uses POP3 or IMAP to receive messages that’s being queued.

7.  Not encrypted  Email passes through intermediate computer  Internet Service Provider (ISP) holds backup copies

8.  Rise of Con artists, hackers, & spammers  Wasn’t based on security to start with  Hard to retrofit a new security mechanism onto something widely used as SMTP.

9.  Choice of easy and fast communication throughout the world.  247 billions emails sent daily  90 trillion sent in year 2009

10.  Was based on Reliability  Emails do get lost due to crowded and spammed servers  Unpredictable timeliness between sender & receiver

11.  No point of emails if it’s not interoperable  Anywhere around the world  To any connected device (i.e. PC’s to Smart Phones)

12.  Anybody that is a member of the IETF  Has been updated many times in different RFCs  Shares ideas how to keep unwanted emails out (i.e. spam, hackers)

13.  So easy a kid can do it  User friendly software/interface  No coding necessary, unlike old times.

14.  Almost any device with internet connectivity.  Web based mail: yahoomail, gmail, hotmail, and many more that nobody even heard of.  Software such as; Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Iphone, Blackberry.  Can be used for personal or business use.

15.  It’s makes life very easy to communicate with people around the world.  Fast, cheap, and easy to use.  Definitely be around in the future because of its convenience.