quietly....

Thu Feb 3 21:41:12 UTC 2011

SMTP is definitely not a p2p protocol in most corporate environments. In ours, all email (even ones that you would think should be host2host) go to a central "smarthost" that processes the mail, and archive it for compliance. All internal to external and external to internal email is tightly controlled and only goes through a very specific route.

Again, big difference between a univerisity or ISP environment and a corporate one.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Palmer [mailto:mpalmer at hezmatt.org]
> Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 4:00 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: quietly....
> 
> On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 03:20:25PM -0500, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > On Thursday, February 03, 2011 02:28:32 pm Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> > > The only reason FTP works through a NAT is because the NAT has already
> > > been hacked up to further mangle the data stream to make up for the
> > > mangling it does.
> >
> > FTP is a in essence a peer-to-peer protocol, as both ends initiate TCP
> > streams.  I know that's nitpicking, but it is true.
> 
> So is SMTP, by the same token.  Aptly demonstrating why the term "P2P" is so
> mind-alteringly stupid.
> 
> - Matt