Talk:Email processes and protocols

The challenge in this article is to introduce a subtopic that has a huge amount of detail without overwhelming the non-expert reader. We can do that by keeping the focus narrow, relying on a parent topic to establish a conceptual framework and terminology for the discussion, and subtopics to offload much of the detail. We will include just those details that are needed for a coherent presentation of this topic, or that are interesting enough to outweigh the burden of including them.

Luckily, we have an authoritative reference (RFC-5321) which covers all the details of SMTP in 94 pages. There is also a Wikipedia article on SMTP, which has a lot of facts and might be more readable than the RFC. In this article, we will try to avoid the "written by committee" style, where every contributor gets to squeeze in a few facts that he considers important.

Terminology is a challenge. Should we use the same terms the experts use (MTA, Reverse Path, etc.) or terms that are more meaningful to non-experts (Mail Relay, Return Address, etc.)? We have chosen the latter, because our articles are intended for non-experts. Experts will have no trouble understanding what we mean, as long as we avoid mis-using any of their special terminology. We will capitalize terms that we intend to have a special meaning (e.g. Relay instead of relay).

Possible Additional Subtopics

  ESMTP - RFC-5321
  Port 587 - RFC-4409
  Reply Codes
    550, 450 - greylisting
  Options
    MAIL FROM