Subject: POP3 has no EHLO! (yup). There is no POP4

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 09:09:26 -0400

John K said:
>EHLO?  On POP3???

Whoops. Your right. How is anything supposed to extend POP3 then? No Way I
guess?

I suppose that's why its frozen in function. Quite sufficient... but not
very extensible, well behaved... close to universal acceptance. Just missing
a few features.

Allthough there are references to IMAP as POP4, there doesn't seem to be a
movement to improve POP. There are some compatible obvious things it might
do better. One that occurs to me is to have a last ditch SPAM hook of some
kind to plumb in a process to evaluate "grade" messages. Maybe even
authenticate them; (or apply site crypto. Not very strong really).

Seems like at first glance SMTP is where you would add functionality, but
changing that is harder than POP becuase your farther away from DNS
management / policies.

Hmmm I wonder if there is some cool POP4 thinking around. Might be fun to
write a POPX compatible program.

Is TLS completely successfull is practice?

regs
Dan

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From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 10:09:07 -0500

On 9/9/03 at 9:09 AM -0400, Dan Kolis wrote:

>How is anything supposed to extend POP3 then? No Way I guess?

RFC 2449: POP3 Extension Mechanism.

>One that occurs to me is to have a last ditch SPAM hook of some kind 
>to plumb in a process to evaluate "grade" messages.

This is either an SMTP mechanism or a local storage mechanism. I 
don't see where in the POP download process you would put this.

>Maybe even authenticate them; (or apply site crypto. Not very strong really).

POP already has authentication (RFC 1734) and TLS (RFC 2595), but I 
don't think that's what you're talking about. I don't see how crypto 
or authentication apply to spam in the context of POP here.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:[email-masked]>
QUALCOMM Incorporated