[ih] Tell me about host names and 3com

[John Gilmore]

Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> If I am an entrepreneur musing about writing a new mail system, both
> clients and server, totally from scratch with no use of existing
> libraries or such, is there any place where I can find the complete
> set of specifications for what my new software has to do in order to
> interoperate with the rest of Internet email?

In short, no.

The "Host Requirements" and "Gateway Requirements" RFCs from 1989 were
originally intended to gather a lot of the miscellaneous changes into a
small number of documents (including a bibliography of the basic specs
like IP, TCP, and SMTP).  However, it has been a long time since new
versions of these compendia came out, and of course the originals were
never perfect.  They preceded important things like CIDR, DHCP, and HTTP
that have become essential in the modern Internet.

For an oversight of the process that created them, see Bob Braden's
"A Perspective on the Host Requirements RFCs":

  https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1127.html

And here is its paragraph on unresolved future work in email protocols:

  (15) SMTP: Global Mail Addressing

      While writing requirements for electronic mail, the working group
      was urged to set rules for SMTP and RFC-822 that would be
      universal, applicable not only to the Internet environment but
      also to the other mail environments that use one or both of these
      protocols.  The working group chose to ignore this Siren call, and
      instead limit the HR RFC to requirements specific to the Internet.
      However, the networking world would certainly benefit from some
      global agreements on mail routing.  Strong passions are lurking
      here.

	John