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Re: more comments on draft-crocker-email-arch-00

2004-06-20 23:50:09

Kai,


MAIL and MLFL commands have died away and UUCP was never part of the
set.  That does not make them any the less important, merely not
within scope for a current description of the main stream of Internet
mail.
KH> Actually, I'm pretty certain UUCP was part of it, and still continues in
KH> some places on the edges. It wasn't ever specified by a RFC (but then,
KH> interaction between UUCP and 822 addressing *was* specified - RFC 976).


Indeed, gatewaying between the uucp world and the arpanet world was an
important and popular activity. My point was about
Arpanet/Internet-related standards activity, rather than about
operational practise.

Gatewaying can become a very distracting topic, particularly when one
is trying to maintain a core architecture/service.  You should not
doing anything with the architecture that knowingly breaks gatewaying
behaviors or opportunities -- or, at least, you should not break it
casually -- but it is a very, very idea to let external services
control the design of the core architecture.  You will spend all your
time chasing after edge conditions and unknown side-effects and...

So, no UUCP was not part of the technical email work done for the
Arpanet or the Internet.  (Note that RFC976 is not standards track.)



d/
--
 Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>