> I was very surprised to learn that it is actually just a “regular” network protocol for two parties to communicate like HTTP, FTP, IMAP, SMPT and etc.
Typo: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
And I suspect many of us tend to think of those as magical abstractions best dealt with through libraries as well:)
I did some work on a MTA a while back and it was genuinely pretty neat to send legit emails to my real mail accounts by just connecting to a port and typing the raw SMTP commands into it. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol#...
Simpler times, when we thought we could trust everyone on the net :)
Typo: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
And I suspect many of us tend to think of those as magical abstractions best dealt with through libraries as well:)