Mail Transport Protocols

Mail delivery from a client application to the server, and from an originating server to the destination server, is handled by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

 

SMTP:-

The primary purpose of SMTP is to transfer email between mail servers. However, it is critical for email clients as well. To send email, the client sends the message to an outgoing mail server, which in turn contacts the destination mail server for delivery. For this reason, it is necessary to specify an SMTP server when configuring an email client.

Under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a user can configure an SMTP server on the local machine to handle mail delivery. However, it is also possible to configure remote SMTP servers for outgoing mail.

One important point to make about the SMTP protocol is that it does not require authentication. This allows anyone on the Internet to send email to anyone else or even to large groups of people. It is this characteristic of SMTP that makes junk email or spam possible. Modern SMTP servers attempt to minimize this behavior by allowing only known hosts access to the SMTP server. Those servers that do not impose such restrictions are called open relay servers.

By default, Sendmail (/usr/sbin/sendmail) is the default SMTP program under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, a simpler mail server application called Postfix (/usr/sbin/postfix) is also available.