[ih] The Atlantic on Email

[Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond]

On 15/03/2016 05:33, Dave Crocker wrote:
> However I seem to recall % also being used for source-routing on Bitnet, 
> which was originally completely independent of uucp mail or arpanet mail.

I'm surprised nobody's spoken of VAX/VMS Mail where the first field was
that of the mailer used.
In most systems is was one of MX%, IN%, or SMTP%.
For example: MX%"John.Doe at example.com"

But in the UK (and I believe in some cases outside the UK too), we ended
up using Coloured Book Software (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols ) which, in
addition to not recognising a mix of %, ", @ also used NRS notation (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS ), which required gateways to

Email addressing was therefore a bit more sporty:
To: John.Doe at example.ac.uk-> CBS%uk.ac.example::John.Doe
To: John.Doe%node2 at example.ac.uk-> CBS%uk.ac.example::node2::John.Doe
Of course, JANET was an acaemic network so if needing to email
example.com, you'd need to route it specifically via NSS (or later,
nsfnet-relay) or Bitnet node UKACRL:
Tp: John.Doe%example.com at uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss ->
CBS%uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss::com.example::John.Doe or
CBS%uk.ac.earn-relay::com.example:John.Doe
To: ...sun!mcvax!ukc!example!John.Doe  ->
CBS%uk.ac.ucl.cs.nss::com.sun::"mcvax!ukc!example!John.Doe"
(worth noting that the UUCP gateway at UKC was only allowing email from
Janet if your establishment had a billing agreement with them. If not,
you needed to route via uunet/sun in the US.

Most challenging was sending to X.400 emails via uk.ac.ean-relay -- and
often the return address parser got itself in a real mess. But you can
see that seldom was @ used. It all went out the window in the early 90s.

Kindest regards,

Olivier

-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html