The Research On The Application Of Directory Service-Based POP3 Protocol

Mail service is one of the most important services on the Internet. It provides a lot of convenience for people's communication. Since it was commercialized in 1994, Internet has got great development and the number of users is increased rapidly. As a key service on Internet, mail service begins to show its shortages gradually. While, as a new service, directory service begins to be adopted widely.This paper firstly introduces some protocols related to mail service and directory service, including POPS, LDAP, IMAP and the mechanism of directory service. Based on the analysis of these protocols, a new mail service mechanism combined with directory service is discussed which looks more flexible and easy to manage.This paper emphasizes the realization of POPS application based on LDAP. A LDAP-based POPGateway is used to resolve the problems related to user management when there are more than one POP server on a LAN. The purpose is to make users not to concern about which POP server is the real POP server their mailbox is located on when users are distributed to different POP servers due to their different attribute, so that, the distributed mail service system is transparent to users. This makes the expansion of mail system and operation of user transfer from one server to another more easy.A method of LDAP-base authentication of POPS is also discussed in this paper and that makes the system more secure.With the development of Internet, it shows more and more demand on improving the mail service, which urges us to put forward more suggestions on the revise of protocols related to email.