Email: Explained from First Principles

If you’re going to learn anything, email is a good bet. It’s barely changed in 30 years, and I suspect it will not change much for a long time. I built my own transactional email provider (https://mailpace.com), I wish I had found this link before I started. I would also recommend reading the email RFCs, they’re not that difficult to understand and the history explains a lot. Email aside we can learn a lot from this kind of distributed, decentralised…

Back in the early 2000's I worked for a company that was the lead firm doing analysis of email spammers for later targeting by the law firms of the big free email providers. The phrase "be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send" certainly applied to SMTP which led to all kinds of craziness in spam. For example: - Emails with multiple "From" fields in the headers - Totally bogus relay chain data - all kinds…