Kurose and Ross Edition 6 Exercise 2 Question P14 (Page No 174)

Question

How does SMTP mark the end of a message body? How about HTTP? Can HTTP use the same method as SMTP to mark the end of a message body? Explain.

Answer 1

SMTP uses a line containing only a period ”.” to mark the end of a message body. HTTP uses “Content-Length header field” to indicate the length of a message body.No, HTTP cannot use the method used by SMTP, because HTTP message could be binary data, whereas in SMTP, the message body must be in 7 bit ASCII format.