The Simple Mail Transport Protocol
The Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) has been around in one form or another for 20 years. The original mail transfer protocol was defined in September of 1980 (RFC 772), although the current version of the protocol wasn't published until RFC 821 came out in August of 1982. Since then, the protocol has remained the same. Some servers might not support some functions, but SMTP is still the email workhorse for the Internet.
Like many of the common Internet protocols, SMTP is text based and uses TCP, so you can use the telnet command to create an SMTP session. The SMTP server usually runs on port 25. Keep in mind, of course, that if you're running Windows, you probably don't have an SMTP server on your local ...
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