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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

  | So SMTP and POP3/IMAP?

I think that the 'clients to talk to servers' part is referring to sending email, unless you think the webmail is the only way to send email. POP/IMAP are for reading email from the receiving server, not for sending out new emails.

  | So NNTP?

I was under the impression that most Usenet networks used UUCP.

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> POP/IMAP are for reading email from the receiving server, not for sending out new emails.

They probably shouldn't be, though, there's an IMAP extension for submission.

> I was under the impression that most Usenet networks used UUCP.

No, NNTP. UUCP hasn't been used seriously for over a decade.

Yours, news.ycombinator.com!ethomson

  | No, NNTP. UUCP hasn't been used seriously for
  | over a decade.

Looked it up and it seems you are mostly[1] right. Some time ago, I picked up the notion that most large Usenet networks synced articles between each other using UUCP, but clients used NNTP to pull down articles for reading. Not being a very avid Usenet user, I just took this at face value (also not knowing much about UUCP, like the fact that it used Layer 1 or Layer 2 protocol prior to TCP/IP).

[1] According to Wikipedia, UUCP was still in use in 2006 for at least one software product.

Some people apparently use UUCP-over-SSH to get mails from their remote mailservers to their local ones, because, you know, fetchmail is evil or something.

Or because it allows them to have a disconnected SMTP server that receives mail. It would be the solution that I would use if I had a multi-user mail server on a network that only occasionally dialed up to the Internet to send/receive mail but was otherwise disconnected.

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