Rating: 
Summary: All developers should own a copy of this book.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great explanation of how email works.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good explanations, poor choice of programming language!
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Hope you like VB
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Hope you like VB
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial treatment
Review: If you want to write a simple program that generates legal mail, then this might do the trick, but if you need to handle anything that is compliant with RFC821 or RFC822 or MIME, then you will be out of luck. You would be much better off with Internet Email Protocols: A Developers Guide by Kevin Johnson. See http://tinyurl.com/yvgra
Rating:
Summary: A very good and simple presentation...
Review: 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.
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