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Eudora User Manual Incoming Mail
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QUALCOMM Incorporated
Incoming Mail
When somebody sends you mail, other computers use the SMTP protocol to deliver the
mail to your POP or IMAP server. Your POP or IMAP server puts mail in your “mail drop,”
where it stays until the Eudora program picks it up. When you check your mail, Eudora
uses POP version 3 or IMAP version 4 to pick up your mail and move it to your computer.
Why doesn’t Eudora use SMTP to receive your mail? SMTP works best when the
computers it knows about are always ready for mail. Unless you wanted to run Eudora 24
hours per day, seven days a week, SMTP wouldn’t work very well for you. It also doesn’t
work well in lab environments, where you might use any number of different computers.
More Information
If you want to know more about the Internet in general, consult the book Internetworking
with TCP/IP, by Douglas Comer, 1988, Prentice-Hall ISBN 0-13-470154-2 025.
If you want to know more about SMTP, RFC 822, POP version 3, MIME, and IMAP, the
official standards are:
RFC 821, “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” by Jonathan B. Postel
RFC 822, “Standard for the Format of Internet Text Messages” by Dave Crocker
RFC 1939, “Post Office Protocol, Version 3” by Marshall Rose
RFC 2045, “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions” by Ned Freed and Nathaniel
Borenstein
RFC 2060, “Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4 Rev 1” by Mark Crispin
You can find the RFCs by anonymous ftp to ds.internic.net, in the rfc directory. Or, in
your Web browser, go to <http://ds.internic.net/ds/dspg1intdoc.html>.
See Internetworking with TCP/IP for details.