From: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Trisquel-users] is email a communication protocol? Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 18:50:54 +0200 (CEST)
> Thanks a lot Leny; that really helps. > > STMP, POP, and IMAP are free, right? And then there are other > proprietary alternatives (as you said)? I'm not sure what the free software community would call them, or what the definition, if any, of a free standard is. But in industry speak they're open internationally accepted standards from a reputable independent body which are not patent encumbered. This is the 'gold standard' for any sort of standard. Things like ECMA standards are often argued not to be of this kind. Internet standards, including email, are in the form of what are called RFCs (Request for Comments - a name of historical accident) and are coordinated, managed and approved by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Here's the RFC homepage http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html Personally I find many of them quite readable and understandable (but knowing a local University if you're a student or recent graduate YMMV). In the email ones you'll find things like a definition of spam and other things which you might not expect in a technical standard. There aren't really proprietary _alternatives_, because effectively all global email between arbitrary parties goes over the Internet for some of the time[*]. It's more that things like Exchange, Notes, and Groupwise date from before the time the internet protocols became dominant. Thus they do their own proprietary thing between themselves and talk internet email protocols to the rest of the world. E.g. historically Exchange was as is typical of M$ an adopt, modify, and subvert of part of an open standard. Internally it at least used to be an X.500 message store. The X.400 suite, which includes X.500 were in vogue at the time. Similarly uucp (which is in the repo) and Fidonet were originally designed to transfer their kinds of email (and files) over POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) acoustic modems in the same era or earlier. Computers literally phoned each other up. Neither of these has email protocols like SMTP, POP & IMAP, they're really file transfers over modem where email files are dumped in the relevant spool location. Mainframe email of that era worked on the same principle - spool to spool copies. My first connection to the Internet was through a uucp connected machine through email. AIUI you can still get most of the Internet's content via email from some server or other (e.g. RMS is said to fetch web pages that way - no nasty Javascript of course, so it's not all web content). I've even seen a mention of the email anonymizer chain still being in operation (but send to it via Tor). * * * After spell checking I notice I'm still using the old correctness. The Internet i.e. the global network is a proper noun, there is only one, and has a capital i. But an internet is any network which uses internet protocols. Oh my what a dinosaur. :)
