hmm@laura.irb.informatik (Martin Mosner) (06/30/87)
Does anyone know which version of POP (the Post Office Protocol) is the most recent ? I've got a protocol description dating from February 1985 (rfc837) which describes POP version 2, and says that it replaces rfc918. On the other hand, I've got a server from the MH mail system which has a date of Sun Oct 28 16:23:26 1984 attached to it and implements a slightly different protocol. Now it seems that this server is obsolete, but there's an accompanying document from October 1985 which describes exactly this protocol and states that it is a revised version of rfc918. And all these 3 items have been written by Marshall T. Rose... Now I don't know whether I should take the server as given and implement my client accordingly, or should rewrite the server to speak POP2, or whatelse. Can anyone enlighten me ? Hans-Martin hmm@unido.uucp D
mrose@GREMLIN.NRTC.NORTHROP.COM (Marshall Rose) (07/06/87)
Well, being Marshall T. Rose, I guess I should respond. There are
several POP protocols. As to which one is the official one, that's
a good question.
The original POP was done at USC/ISI. The people working on MH
liked this quite a bit but weren't able to quite implement it, so I
did an alternate service/protocol specification and put that in MH.
Shortly thereafter, USC/ISI came out with POP2, which pretty much
fixed all the problems in the original POP. For reasons not worth
going into, MH's POP and ISI's POP2 never merged, so future POP work
in MH used MH's POP. This future work included support for remote
BBoards (which you can also get with NNTP, I think) and support for
Stanford's version of MH for the PC.
About 10 months ago, the parties involved were supposed to get
together and solve this problem (multiple versions), but we never
got around to it. Hence the current situation.
The question as to which version is official and which version(s)
are useful, being widely implemented, is problematic. The original
POP is history. That leaves POP2 and MH's POP.
/mtrron@MANTA.NOSC.MIL (Ron Broersma) (07/07/87)
It would be nice if someone decided what was the official version of POP. We assumed some time ago that the official version was POP2 because at the time that was the latest POP protocol documented in an RFC. I had the MH version but it clearly didn't implement POP2 although it did some other things nicely. We have our own PC mail implementation. It uses POP2 because we like to stick with standards and we thought POP2 was it. If someone is going to merge POP2 and MH-POP into POP3 and call it the standard, that would be great. However, I'd like a chance to have input because we have found POP2 to be deficient in a couple of minor ways and were required to modify it and hence stray from the "standard", sigh. --Ron