Talk:Email processes and protocols

The challenge in this article is to introduce a topic that has a huge amount of detail without overwhelming the non-expert reader. We need to avoid the "written by committee" style, where every contributor gets to squeeze in a few facts that he considers important. Luckily, we have an authoritative reference (RFC-5321) which covers all the details in 94 pages. We will include just those details that are needed for a coherent presentation of the basics, or that are interesting enough to outweigh the burden of including them. The reader needing more facts can also go to the Wikipedia article, which is a lot more verbose than this one.

Terminology is also a challenge. Should we use the same terms the experts use (MTA, Reverse Path, etc.) or terms that are more meaningful to non-experts (Mail Relay, Return Address, etc.)? We have chosen the latter, because our articles are intended for non-experts. Experts will have no trouble understanding what we mean, as long as we avoid mis-using any of their special terminology. We will capitalize terms that we intend to have a special meaning (e.g. Relay instead of relay).

Possible Additional Topics

 ESMTP - RFC-5321
 Port 587 - RFC-4409
 Reply Codes
   550, 450 - greylisting
 Options
   MAIL FROM