Customer Reviews

Programmer's Guide to Internet Mail: SMTP, POP, IMAP, and LDAP (HP Technologies)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book because I am writing an SMTP server. While I already had most of the code written, I was looking for "nuances" and anything I may not have thought of. This book provided a few extra bits of information that were helpful.

If I were writing any kind of mail client, this would be the *perfect* book for that. While it does include rudimentary code for various servers, they're woefully incomplete (as they probably should be for this type of book) and require a bit of extra work if you want to use them in a production environment.

As for the book itself, it is very well written and very easy to read. The VB code examples are helpful and enhance the text explanations very well. Had this book included a CDROM with the code (instead of making you search the web for it) I would have given it 4.5 stars. Add to that better code examples and a better discussion on server applications and it would have been 5 stars.

The book is simply wonderful. It cover all theory about email and should always be at the side of any professional who really need to understand the technology behind products

Furthermore to good descriptions of smtp, mime, pop3 and imap, this book contain the best explanations of asn.1 and ldap that I am able to find.

It also include extremely useful examples and downloadable code. Using the programers toolkit of internet mail (ptim) I can examined and analyzed other protocols from ftp & http to snmp.

I read John Rhoton's earlier book on X400 and SMTP and was happy to find out he wrote a book putting the first one into practice. The illustrations are excellent. It is sad he chose to write them all in Visual Basic. It tarnishes the neutral image and lets the Microsoft bias show through.

This book gives a good description of how the mail protocols work. It is easy to follow and covers all the major topics. I found the downloadable examples extremely practical and have already used one to debug one mail related problem.

All developers should own a copy of this book. This is one of the best technical books I have bought to date.

The topic is dynamite! Six months ago there were no books on how to program email using standard protocols. Now there are three! Kevin Johnson, John Rhoton and David Wood have all brought out excellent books on the subject. Adding mail to your applications is in! If your budget is tight just get this book and a copy of the RFCs, but if you are serious about this stuff you are going to need all three books as well as all the mail RFCs.

Unlike other books which are padded with useless information this one cuts straight to the chase. It is concise but easy to read and it contains all you need to know to start writing mail applications.

Sure, if you want to really go deep you will need to do some more research, like reading the RFCs. And you're probably going to want to use some programming language other than VB.

But this book gets you started on the right track and tells you where to go to get more depth.

The on-line examples (once you find them on download.com) are great and really help to give you a picture of what is going on.

This is one of the most useful books I have bought.

John Rhoton has taken an otherwise poorly understood set of protocols and explained them simply and sensibly. This is a great book to start anybody down the road of Internet mail.

I was very disappointed by this book. The information about each of the mail protocols was very light, and the books seemed to be mostly sample code listings. If you are totally unfamiliar with any of the protocols it may be useful, but if you are looking to do any real programming the book doesn't cover enough information to let you do proper design.

I bought this because I wanted to understand how email gets routed around the internet using DNS. This book accomplished that. I found this book slightly better than David Wood's "Programming Internet Email" due to its coverage of DNS. However I'm glad I own both books.

I feel that I could write SMTP servers and mail clients etc. after reading this. Lots of great example code (although it is all in VB not C).

This did a great job of explaining the topics and then refers you to the RFCs themselves if you need complete detail.

I can just say thanks to author for writing this book. If we have more books like this we wouldn't have so much frustration in everyday life. The book title might confuse the people about content and use of the book. But I would say that this book is for everyone who wants to know how e-mail works. If you are not programmer than just skip the code and read everything in between. The book is so good that even without that code part it would be still complete and excellent guide how e-mail works.