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Re: V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of e-mail honored by Smithsonian

2012-02-29 03:03:42

Carl S. Gutekunst wrote:

ned+ietf-smtp(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
> ... but as it happens there is a pretty clear and simple model for
> the semantics that attach to bcc.

X.400 documented this pretty clearly. If we're going to discuss a model
for Internet Mail, it'd be worth at least using that as a starting point.

Gonna have to disagree with you there... yes, the documents expand a large number of
words documenting something they called a model, but the term "clear"
definitely did not apply. If it had then none of the various operational
profiles of X.400 like GOSIP (which added another three inch of paper to the pile) would have been wanted or needed.

I was only referring to BCC, which (in the dusty corners of my memory) I recall being one of the very few features of X.400 that I liked better than what we were doing on Internet Mail, if only because it actually defined it.

Yes, certainly a high usage usefulness to keep certain people in the loop.

To me, as I seem to recall, it became harder with the advent of gateways and store and forward, i.e. decentralization.

For example, in my old 80's Silver Xpress product, which I promoted as a "time shifted emulation of online hosting" supporting all the online security requirements in an offline fashion, there was some parts where the MUA can just push the mail with a BCC marker to the server and it knew how to handle it. The server was ready for it. The reader was offline, but it 100% emulated how the host will manage the mail. With an RFC-Based offline MUA, it needed to separate the sending as different transactions because the SMTP host was not ready for BCC separation idea and in my view, this was better for mail network gateways didn't need to worry about it as well.


--
HLS