The Post Office Protocol, Version 3
The Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) allows you to read your email over the network. In the early days, you had an SMTP server on your machine that would store your email in a local mailbox file. As the Internet grew, more people with small machines needed to read their email. It was impractical to expect each of these machines to run an SMTP server for receiving mail. Instead, Internet service providers set up POP3 servers that allowed users to read their email over the network, either keeping it on the ISP's server, or downloading it to a local mailbox.
As with many other Internet protocols, POP3 is a text-based protocol. Once again, you can interact with a POP3 server using the telnet command. Listing ...
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