At 03:14 PM 1/26/2001 -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
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.
architecturally, the MAIL commands within FTP were identical to SMTP. They
were an email transport protocol.
Both delivermail/Sendmail and MMDF were alive an kicking before
RFC821. The introduction of SMTP did not alter the roles or basic system
processing of either of these applications. It just added one more
transport protocol to their set. That is, however we would characterize
their behaviors now, such as distinguishing activities within the MUA
versus elsewhere -- it was the same before SMTP.
There were other email processes that worked the same way, but the only one
I know any details about was the MMDF predecessor that we did at Rand in
1978. My impression is that the Multics NCP email software had a similar
architecture.
d/
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Dave Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg Consulting <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253, Fax: +1.408.273.6464