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RE: Blast from the past

2001-01-26 13:30:02


--On Thursday, 25 January, 2001 23:41 -0500 vint cerf
<vcerf(_at_)MCI(_dot_)NET> wrote:

my recollection is that we did very little email conversion -
but maybe I am thinking just about ftp?

With FTP, the mail was delivered more or less into the space of
the receiving user.  So any conversations that were done (and I
can't remember much, if anything) would have needed to be done in
what we would now call the receiving MUA -- there really was no
_mail_ transport process.

I don't recall any application-level conversions between
NCP-based mail transport and the TCP-based.  Note that SMTP was
designed to run transparently over either and that RFC 821
contains sections that explain how to interpret the standard in
the two (and other) environments.

Where we did have a good deal of mail conversion action was at
less-well-designed transport boundaries or systems.  E.g.,
BITNET-Internet was a relatively big deal, and CSNet-Internet and
UUCP Mail-Internet were presumably also significant.

     john




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