Ivan Centamori explains how the venerable Simple Mail Transfer Protocol works and why it is so long-lived and still nearly like it was decades ago.
[...] it is not the latest JavaScript framework born last night and already obsolete this morning. No. It is persistence. It is the ability of certain technologies to remain immobile while the world around them swirls madly.
@amoroso
While I certainly appreciate protocols that do not change every morning (e.g. everything Web, Cloud or AI), the email world (IMF, SMTP, IMAP) is a good example of how bad things become when they are not aggressively improved. IMAP in particular is an abomination.
Anyone who tried to implement these protocols realizes quickly how bad the situation is.
(same things for X.509, btw, and don't get me started on DNS)
