How to telnet from OS X

Why in the heck does Apple's High Sierra version of OS X lack a telnet client? It smells like they removed it for "security" reasons but without it, how am I supposed to poke at an SMTP server to manually test mail server things in my life as an email geek?

Thankfully, there's "nc" to the rescue. nc (or netcat) has a very fine man page that suggests it can do more than telnet does and that it's easily scriptable. I don't know if I care about that, but I do care about this:

$ nc s1.xnnd.com 25
220 happydance.xnnd.com ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
HELO homeserver.com
250 happydance.xnnd.com
QUIT
221 2.0.0 Bye

Smells like a good enough replacement for telnet as far as I'm concerned!