Micheal Espinola Jr wrote:
Are or were ? smtp supports tls for example (I dropped irc because I have very little knowledge about it).Is SMTP bad? Yes.
Why? Because they are simple and basic protocol implementations
Not that they aren't efficient and easy, butsmtp supports both plaintext (login/password) and tls/certificate authentications. Configuration is not a technology issue but a sysadmin issue.
they certainly have their shortcomings in terms of security and AAA.
smtp is backward compatible with fossile like technology (sendmail comes to mind as it have a 'good' bugs record) but also 21th century technology aware (s/mime, tls).We need to move forward with technology. Or would you rather be like Microsoft - and attempt to be backward compatible for all-time - and continue to use products that have fundamental flaws in them?
Much could be said against protocols such as rpc, ftp, telnet, iiop, http, ... but some/most of them are also supporting some somewhat new technology (encryption, authentication, ...) some of them do not add much value when used over the internet (rpc comes to mind) these are more lan protocols.
Microsoft don't try to be backward compatible: w2k is not backward compatible with nt or dos, even xp sp2 is not backward compatible with xp sp1:-)
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