The initially unrestricted host-to-host ommunication model provided by the Internet Protocol has deteriorated due to political and technical hanges caused by Internet growth. While this is not a problem for most client-server applications, peer-to-peer networks frequently struggle with peers that are only partially reachable. We describe how a peer-to-peer framework can hide diversity and obstacles in the underlying Internet and provide peer-to-peer applications with abstractions that hide transport specific details. We present the details of an implementation of a transport service based on SMTP. Small-scale benchmarks are used to compare transport services over UDP, TCP, and SMTP.