Hadmut Danisch wrote:
No. When e-mail was introduced in the early days, it was based on
UUCP.
E-mail predates UUCP. Tho, UUCP was the first time at which e-mail was
broadly available outside of ARPAnet.
Every incoming mail had an automatically generated return path
(comparable to today's Received: header lines), but each single node
had to authenticate against each next node in the path. But walking
back that recorded path, you had a full authentication path back to
the origin of the message (except for flaws of password authentication
and the weakness of the nodes themselfes).
And there's the rub. Anyone anywhere along the path could have forged
everything previous to them. Not much different than the issues with
SMTP. UUCP has _somewhat_ more node-to-node security than SMTP, but in
the end it doesn't really mean much, because if you could get to the
rmail executable, you could do just about anything - at least to the
point of not being detectable by naive recipients.
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