As students c.a 2004 we were tasked with writing a MTA. Actually, many MTAs. Divided in small teams (1-3 people), each MTA would ultimately be pointed to the

As students c.a 2004 we were tasked with writing a MTA. Actually, many MTAs. Divided in small teams (1-3 people), each MTA would ultimately be pointed to the next MTA, and the teacher would use telnet to send a message over SMTP to the first one, the goal being that the message had to reach the last one in the chain. Grades were attributed based on whether a team's implementation failed, crashed, mangled the message and whatnot, and also as a whole to promote team spirit all in good faith and sports. It was quite fun. (pretty confident we did HTTP things too although I have no actual recollection of it)