Paul Vixie wrote:
utk-mail11 may have seemed to you like a way to extend the internet, but
to the greybeards of the time who had crapped upon bitnet and uucp, decnet
mail11 (for example, DECWRL.ENET.DEC.COM) was an abuse of the MX RR, not a
"good way" to use the technology.
Here our views of history differ. I can't say that I had a gray beard
at the time, nor that I was at all involved in the design, but I was
there, and I think there was something of a view that the whole point of
MXes was for the MX relay to bridge between online and offline devices.
It was well understood at the time that MANY more systems were in fact
on the networks that you mentioned than were on the ARPANET. And I
would even argue that there MXes solved a major problem, which was that
there was that sites that sat on both UUCP and the Internet often times
Got It Wrong with regard to the precedence of "!". The abstraction that
MX provided made relaying behavior much more explicit. I think this was
understood at the time.
Regards,
Eliot
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