CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httpemailsmtp
sunnyrjuneja
sunnyrjuneja

Reputation: 6123

What Necessitates a Different Protocol for Email?

In what way is HTTP inappropriate for E-mail? How (for example) does the statefulness of IMAP benefit client development?

What actually are the arguments for keeping them separate other then historical and backwards compatibility reasons?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 195

Answers (2)

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189607

SMTP, IMAP, and HTTP are specialized application-level protocols. If there was a generic application-level protocol which all of these could inherit from, you could usefully refactor things, but since that is not the case, wedging the other protocols into one of the existing protocols is hardly worth the effort, and would hardly simplify things.

As things are now, the history and backwards compatibility is not just a cultural heritage, it is also a long and complex process of defining application-specific features for each protocol. SMTP is store-and-forward, which introduces the need for audit headers (Received: et al.). IMAP was designed for concurrent access to a data store, which is what made it necessary to introduce state (who are you, where are you authorized to connect, which folder are you connected to, what have you already seen, read, or deleted). HTTP is fundamentally a pull protocol (pull down a web page) and the POST facility carries with it a lot of functionality specific to the CGI protocol and the overall content model of HTTP.

Upvotes: 2

vonbrand
vonbrand

Reputation: 11831

SMTP is a protocol that identifies the sender and the recipients to send individual mail messages, each mail server accepts (or not) mail to forward, eventually reaching the destination. HTTP is meant for anybody to connect to the server and look at (mostly the same) contents. They are quite fundamentally different, and so it makes a lot of sense to use different protocols.

Upvotes: 0

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