Programmer's Guide to Internet Mail: Smtp, Pop, Imap, and LDAP

Unlike other books which are padded with useless information this one cuts straight to the chase. It is concise but easy to read and it contains all you need to know to start writing mail applications. Sure, if you want to really go deep you will need to do some more research, like reading the RFCs. And you're probably going to want to use some programming language other than VB.But this book gets you started on the right track and tells you where to go to get more depth.The on-line examples (once you find them on download.com) are great and really help to give you a picture of what is going on.This is one of the most useful books I have bought.

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.

The book is simply wonderful. It cover all theory about email and should always be at the side of any professional who really need to understand the technology behind products Furthermore to good descriptions of smtp, mime, pop3 and imap, this book contain the best explanations of asn.1 and ldap that I am able to find.It also include extremely useful examples and downloadable code. Using the programers toolkit of internet mail (ptim) I can examined and analyzed other protocols from ftp & http to snmp.

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.

This book gives a good description of how the mail protocols work. It is easy to follow and covers all the major topics. I found the downloadable examples extremely practical and have already used one to debug one mail related problem.