jpinkerton wrote:
I'd like to provide some basic information about how e-mail
works for idiots like myself.
That has been done on numerous pages, if you want to start a
collection of _German_ links see below... ;-)
the documentation (hopefully only one document) which
describes all the possible mail headers, who sets them, who
can modify them, what they mean, and who reads them.
That would be Graham's future IANA registry, the draft URL is
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klyne-hdrreg-mail-05.txt>
It's not the stuff for clueless users, but a nice dictionary of
mail headers.
I'd like to do an "Idiots guide to SMTP"
That should exist already. Check the link sections in these
fine FAQs (ignoring the funny German text of course ;-)
<http://www.faqs.org/faqs/de-net-abuse/email-header-faq/>
<http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/de-net-abuse/mail-faq.html>
You'll probably find corresponding English texts at faqs.org -
and never forget, the S in SMTP stands for Simple ;-) Bye, Frank