SMTP receive as well as send

[Greg Ward spamdrop - see sig for preferred]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000 22:20:17 +0100, Phil Harris <phil.harris at zope.co.uk> wrote:
> I may be talking out of the hole where the sun don't shine here, so someone
> correct me if I'm wrong, but:
> 
> SMTP is only for sending, isn't it?
> POP3 is only for receiving, isn't it?

Correct, if you're talking from the point-of-view of an ordinary
Internet client, eg. the type of machine that sits on your desk.  But
mail servers have to handle the other side of things: when you connect
to your ISP's POP server to pick up mail, the server is sending mail
through POP (although it's an on-demand, "pull" type of transmission).
When you send mail from your PC (using SMTP), you again connect to your
ISP's mail server, which then receives your message using SMTP.

There are a couple of books out there on programming Internet mail; one
from O'Reilly and one from (I think) Addison-Wesley, so they're probably 
both pretty good.  Anyone who thinks they want to write an SMTP server
in Python (or any language) should probably get one of those books.  And 
then they should head for one of www.{qmail,exim,postfix}.org to get a
real SMTP server.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward                                      gward at python.net
http://starship.python.net/~gward/