Re: SMTP and GET

On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 16:54, Mark Baker wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 04:00:12PM -0400, Amelia A Lewis wrote:
> > Are there any other schemes that are largely write-only, associated with
> > protocols that are effectively write-only (in SMTP, you can't ask for
> > your mail; TURN has been deprecated for longer than I've been on the
> > net, and ETRN signals the desire for the start of another transaction
> > with role reversal)?  How about read-only?  POP is largely read-only, I
> > suppose (updates happen outside the protocol).
> 
> FWIW, SMTP isn't write-only.  It has safe and idempotent methods; VRFY
> and EXPN.

Ahem.  Which every paranoid admin disabled ten years ago.

> So you could imagine having an identifier for a mailbox, clicking on
> it, and seeing "'foo' is not a recognized user in the bar.com domain".
> (i.e. the output of VRFY)

Hmm.  Okay, interesting.  In a sense, it corresponds to GET, I suppose,
at least GET used in the sense of "is it real, or is it 404?"

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis
Architect, TIBCO/Extensibility, Inc.
alewis@tibco.com