Re: MTAMARK (was: SPF I-D for review: draft-schlitt-spf-classic-01.txt)

On Mon, 30 May 2005 22:40:18 +0200, Markus Stumpf said:

> IMHO it was never a fundamental principle of email that a MUA can
> connect to any MX and get a message delivered. In fact, before the
> Internet boom, MUAs like "mail" or "elm" couldn't even speak SMTP.
Actually, 'mail' and 'elm' never bothered to learn to speak SMTP themselves,
because there was always the assumption that the box that was running mail or
elm had a Sendmail running, and that you could just hand the whole mess off to
Sendmail and let *it* worry about it.

And that's been true since at least 1984, when I was hacking sendmail.cf
files with vi, and the arpanet/milnet had only some 3,000 or so hosts on it.
/bin/mail would just hand it to Sendmail.  I don't think Elm existed yet.

And there *was* general acceptance of the concept that the Sendmail could
connect to whatever MX destinations it wanted to - the concept of a 'smarthost'
was merely to make the sysadmin's job easier, not for any innate technical
reason...

pgpB4BvTWY1dV.pgp
Description: PGP signature