[DanielBMarkham]

Building an email client is one of those fun projects you can play with and learn a lot about how the internet works at the same time. Like most cool projects, you can either stop with a little functionality or keep going into all kinds of other stuff.

Telnet clients are also fun. I haven't written an http client, but looking at the state of web programming, I imagine that is a whole nother can of worms. I think I'd rather go for a root canal.

[Twisol]

Telnet clients are fun! It's easy to discard Telnet as an ancient, obsolete protocol, but the core of its design is actually very enlightening.

[codewright]

HTTP clients aren't really that bad, if you're not trying to implement the full state of the current batch of relevant RFCs.