E-mail server

[Lv0f92yv]

I am working on a small e-mail server-esque project.

I am not going to support fancy things like POP3/IMAP, just a really simple text-based e-mail server and client.

My question is, when I was to ask the client for things like username/password, what is a good way to do this? I can read and write strings to and from sockets, but I want to know how real server requests/handles are sent...

I suppose I can use structs, but on different platforms structs may be different sizes and not be stable when received on the other end of the connection...

How are these types of requests sent?

Thanks

[kev82]

I'm afraid that MUAs do only tend to support getting email via POP3/IMAP and sending email via SMTP. If you want to write a server, you are going to need to learn those protocols, or at least a subset of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_user_agent#Protocols

[Lv0f92yv]

Thanks!