The author didn't really ask for a code review, though a lot of people imagining themselves in the position of technical hiring manager are already taking care

The author didn't really ask for a code review, though a lot of people imagining themselves in the position of technical hiring manager are already taking care of that. Anyway: I don't think homework assignments are a valuable mechanism for filtering out candidates. Setting aside shoulds and shouldnots and the ethics of it and everything else, it simply provides a really poor signal for the value of a potential candidate. Especially today, when something like this particular assignment could just be pasted into any of the popular LLMs and returned as completed within a couple hours. If an organization wants to hire developers that can take vague project descriptions and convert them into code that may or may not do whatever was in the heads of the people that wrote the project description, then (a) that's a bad practice, but (b) it would be better for everyone involved if you handled this over a video call. If your staff are too busy to do a small pile of video calls with potential candidates over a couple of weeks, then they are too busy to properly onboard a new candidate and you should probably just pack it in. (i.e., they are not too busy to do this.) If the goal is to hire somebody that knows IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc. inside-and-out and can crank out RFC-compliant code without using any of the third-party libraries that already exist for this sort of thing, then the assignment description should have asked for that. Homework assignments are an unfortunately common practice, but worst of all, most of them are carelessly designed.