When I was at Fog Creek, we still had that as an interview question (with googling allowed). It was a good judge of how most folks approached something they used but didn’t necessarily understand. If the applicant already knew how to do it, that was a different signal as well.
Think ChatGPT would be allowed nowadays? It’d be my source for something so esoteric. I haven’t bothered to learn mail protocols because any message you send will be marked as spam unless it’s from a major provider.
This is not true. I run a mail server for myself and some friends. It started as an old desktop running under the desk at a university, transitioned to the back corner of a server room when I was working as a network engineer, and now it runs on a Raspberry Pi in a closet of my house. I had to pay extra to get a static IP at home, but everything has been off the shelf and DIY. My current Raspberry Pi has been running for nearly ten years, with only one interruption (the SD card failed). The idea that you can’t run your own mail server is a myth, and I think more people should do it. It is not hard, and you will learn a ton.
(I used to run mail for a large corporation, so yeah, I know a lot. But I learned how to do it by running a mail server out of my dorm room.)
Happy to hear that; thanks for correcting me. I was going off of what other people said, which I should have mentioned. It’s nice to know that it’s still possible to run a mail server.
No idea, but if it was available back then, we’d have been looking for whether you are critical about what it tells you and how you verified it was correct. That was a main idea behind the interview.
