Smtp Authentication

Question

I am writing a class to connect to a SMTP server over SSL and send a mail. The smtp server i am using (yahoo) requires authentication. Can someone tell me how the authentication takes place as to which commands i should use to send my user credentials?

Note: I know about the JavaMail API. I just want a simple class to send mail without outside libraries.

Answer 1

Internet RFC 821 covers the basics of the SMTP protocol, and RFC 2554 covers the authentication extensions. You'll need many of them to get a functional SMTP client up.

But, really, it's much simpler to just use JavaMail (unless this is a homework assignment, in which case, I'm guessing that would be cheating.)