By Won Lee

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
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.


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

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.


Not encrypted

Email passes through
intermediate computer

Internet Service
Provider (ISP) holds
backup copies

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.

Choice of easy and fast
communication
throughout the world.

247 billions emails sent
daily

90 trillion sent in year
2009

Was based on
Reliability

Emails do get lost due
to crowded and
spammed servers

Unpredictable
timeliness between
sender & receiver

No point of emails if it’s
not interoperable

Anywhere around the
world

To any connected
device (i.e. PC’s to
Smart Phones)

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)

So easy a kid can do it

User friendly
software/interface

No coding necessary,
unlike old times.

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.

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.