Subject: [Asrg] old mail protocols and authentication of sender

From: "Tom Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 19:14:34 -0000

> > > No. When e-mail was introduced in the early days, it was based on
> > > UUCP.
> >
> > There were lots of early email systems, and I don't want to argue about
which
> > one predates another.  I was speaking of the ARPAnet/Internet context
that
> > eventually created rfc822 and SMTP.  This community did not start out
using
> > UUCP; very few of them were even using UNIX.
>
> There were pretty strict requirements before you could connect to the
> early DARPA/ARPA/DARPA inter-network network.  I agree that UUCP
> wasn't the predecessor to the current internet STMP system, but
> Hadmut's point that there was much tighter authentication in the past
> seems to be valid.

I seem to remember that the internet started out using RFC733 (not RFC822,
which was a fair bit later) and that there was a requirement for mail
compatibility between "old" ARPANET using NCP and the "new" INTERNET using
TCP (with UUCP not getting a mention at the time - twentythree years ago -
so far as I can remember). Anyway, RFC822 isn't even remotely relevant to
UUCP versus NCP versus TCP discussions or to envelope sender authentication,
since it does not address that level of protocol at all (RFC822 is not
RFC821, and I'm not sure even RFC821 specifies that TCP is the carrier, it's
a very long time since I read it but there's no reason why it should).
I don't believe any of the systems in use in the early days of the internet
provided any form of authentication of the sender at all. Also it's worth
remembering that it was nowhere near universal for MUAs to be RFC733
conformant, let alone RFC822 conformant, and that RFC821 was certainly not a
universally used mail protocol, until the 1990s (plenty of addresses with
explicit routing in them, whether n@a@b@c format or n%a%b@c format or
c!b!a!n format or a mixture of all three around until about 10 years ago).
The European contemporaries, EARN and JANET, did no better on email sender
authentication than INTERNET did (in other words they did exactly nothing on
it - I remember knocking up a send only MUA on an ICL mainframe in
Manchester for occassions when I couldn't reach my usual MTA and happily
using it to send grey-book mail to JANET, EARN, and INTERNET addresses
"from" my usual mail address on a Unix machine in Oxford - without the mail
ever going within a couple of hundred miles of that machine).

Tom Thomson

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