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While email is an application that is, for example, tightly tied to DNS (check the SOA record), SMTP is a protocol that has got a lot of improvements, addenda, enhacements and the likes. But, IMHO, it is far from being comparable in features and security with other (modern) communication protocols like XMPP.

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SMTP and XMPP do not exactly accomplish the same goal, nor have the same intentions. Sure, they both overlap in areas, but they're both interfaces (protocols) for implementation of tools. Tools that are suited for certain jobs.

Modern XMPP solved problem of loosing messages silently when a TCP connection is broken only with one of later added XEPs extensions while ancient SMTP did it from the beginning (a messages will be retried unless there was a response to dot command). Probably SMTP authors better understood how TCP works. Modern is not automatically implies that lessons of the past was learned.

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