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From: mrose@GREMLIN.NRTC.NORTHROP.COM (Marshall Rose)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: status of POP
Message-ID: <17001.552573412@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com>
Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 08:52:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: gremlin.17001.552573412
Posted: Mon Jul  6 08:52:39 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 7-Jul-87 01:56:26 EDT
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    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.

/mtr