[ih] DMARC [was "Father of e-Marketing"]

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Jack Haverty wrote in <7dd9ef0d-e977-f620-3a75-3a53332a508b at 3kitty.org>:
 |On 6/3/19 1:23 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
 |> Maybe we can talk here about the history of anti-spam techniques.
 |
 |The mail system I wrote at MIT-DM in the mid 70s allowed each user to
 |create a file of instructions that the mail daemon would execute
 |whenever an incoming mail arrived for that user.  Those instructions
 |were simply a program fragment that would be loaded and run by the
 |daemon with the incoming mail available to it for whatever kind of
 |processing the user might want.
 |
 |So it was easy to do things by rules something like "if FROM = <spammer>
 |or SUBJECT contains "SALE" then discard", and the user would never be
 |bothered by such a message.   One common use of the feature was to
 |automatically categorize incoming mail into folders based on things like
 |addressees, source, words in the subject or body, etc.   One of the
 |destination categories could of course be the recycle bin.  

That is certainly great, i have never heard of anything such
before.  It sounds as if it has been the grandfather or the
inspiration of the now standardized Sieve language, which came up
in 1999 (Wikipedia).

 |Users wrote interesting fragments of code to do such stuff and shared
 |them with others; each fragment was typically just a line or two of code.
 |
 |Users also used the feature to do things like automatically
 |re-distribute incoming messages matching some rule to other users, e.g.,
 |to other members of a particular project team.   One clever use somebody
 |coded was in response to the chronic shortage of PDP-10 memory and
 |cycles.  It was considered anti-social to run a compile job while
 |someone else was running one, so someone gave the compiler a mailbox and
 |to compile your program you'd simply mail it to the compiler which would
 |handle it when it could, and email you when complete - a form of "batch
 |processing" by email.

I like this very much, really.  There are so many job queue
implementations out there, some of them even really heavyweight.
Just using a mail account with some plain text control messages is
a minimal beauty, or dainty minimal, however you turn it.
(Though sequential only here, i would presume.)

 |Licklider was very keen on this kind of "Man Computer Symbiosis" where
 |the computer would do things for the human on its own initiative.
 |
 |Sometimes that led to trouble.....
 |
 |One specific case I remember was a rule that looked to see if an
 |incoming mail matched the subject/from/body of any recent previously
 |received message.  If it found a match, the incoming message was
 |deleted.   This was a technique to deal with "routing loops" that could
 |occur if anyone created a loop in their various distribution lists - a
 |phenomenon related to what was later known as "cross-posting".  That
 |rule was quickly coded after the second or third time our disk filled up
 |with looping messages and I figured out what was happening.
 |
 |All of this happen in the mid-70s, certainly before 1977 when I left MIT.
 |
 |/Jack Haverty
 |
 |(MIT-DM 1970-1977)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)