It's hard to imagine why anyone thought SMTP was a good design.
Were they trying to make it obtuse or did they just love the back and forth, time consuming, command/response conversational style with multiple different response codes to be parsed at each step?
As this example shows, the whole thing can easily be done in a single POST.
I guess the main reason is that SMTP pre-dates HTTP. And even DNS. Back then such a protocol where you can manually type commands and read server responses was considered normal.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 12.7 ms ] threadWere they trying to make it obtuse or did they just love the back and forth, time consuming, command/response conversational style with multiple different response codes to be parsed at each step?
As this example shows, the whole thing can easily be done in a single POST.