SMTP, defined in RFC 5321, is at the heart of Internet electronic mail. As mentioned above, SMTP transfers messages from senders’mail servers to the recipients’ mail servers. SMTP is much older than HTTP. (The original SMTP RFC dates back to 1982, and SMTPwas around long before that.) Although SMTPhas numerous wonderful qualities, as evidenced by its ubiquity in the Internet, it is nevertheless a legacy technology that possesses certain archaic characteristics. For example, it restricts the body (not just the headers) of all mail messages to simple 7-bit ASCII. This restriction made sense in the early 1980s when transmission capacity was scarce and no one was e-mailing large attachments or large image, audio, or video files. But today, in the multimedia era, the 7-bit ASCII restriction is a bit of a pain—it requires binary multimedia data to be encoded to ASCII before being sent over SMTP; and it requires the corresponding ASCII message to be decoded back to binary after SMTP transport. Recall from Section 2.2 that HTTP does not require multimedia data to be ASCII encoded before transfer. To illustrate the basic operation of SMTP, let’s walk through a common scenario. Suppose Alice wants to send Bob a simple ASCII message.