> This raises the question why does anyone need Relays?
For administrative control, traffic aggregation and routing control. These are
the same reasons that packet-switches, such as IP Routers, are used at the
network layer.
The only example
> is in the first paragraph of 2.2.3, a text-to-binary converter. Seems to
> me that such a device would have to be outside the TCP/IP network. The
> data in an IP datagram is always binary.
However the default data encoding at the email layer is not binary. It is a
modified 7-bit ASCII.
Handling System. As long as there is an insecure *Forwarder* in the chain-
of-trust from the original Sender to the final Receiver we have the
possibility that the Return-Path can be faked.
yup.
With a good forwarding protocol, I would not need an expert to study the
headers in the above email to find the source of the problem.
This assessment would be more comfortable to make if there were examples of
high-quality chain-of-trust systems that operated on the scale of the Internet
and with anything like the underlying administrative model. The only examples
of related models I can think of involve governmental oversight and/or legal
contracts.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
+1.408.246.8253
dcrocker a t ...
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