RFCs made easy

The internet runs on a stack of documents almost nobody reads. They're called RFCs — “Requests for Comments” — and they're the specifications behind every protocol you use without thinking: the @ in your email address, the padlock in your browser, the one-click Unsubscribe button at the top of this message. Each one is a few dozen pages of dense, precise prose written for implementers, full of BNF grammars and MUST/SHOULD/MAY clauses, and most of them have aged into something closer to folklore than reference material.

RFCs made easy is a short weekly newsletter that picks one RFC and tells you the story behind it: what problem it was solving, who fought about it, what got into the final spec and what got cut, and which parts still quietly shape your inbox, your terminal, and your browser tabs today. No prerequisites, no code, no homework — just one well-told piece of internet history per week, in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

If you've ever wondered why email addresses use @ instead of !, why TLS handshakes look the way they do, or what the difference between multipart/mixed and multipart/alternative actually is — this is the newsletter for you.

Subscribe once. Unsubscribe in one click whenever you've had enough.