[ih] SMTP History

[Dave Crocker]

On 3/28/2022 2:24 PM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
> 
> RFC 354 (July 1972 and edited by Abhay Bhushan) does not contain the 
> string 'mail'.
> 
> RFC 475 (March, 1973 and edited by Abhay Bhushan) discusses FTP's MAIL 
> and MLFL commands. It is a meeting report discussing agreement to create 
> those commands.
> 
> RFC 542 (August 1973 and edited by Nancy Neigus) does not contain the 
> string 'mail'.
> 
> RFC 765 (Aug, 1973 and edit by Jon Postel) does. But while is cites a 
> mail command, it does not specify it.


Looking back farther:


RFC 171 (june 1971, lots of authors) cites mail as one of the likely 
customers of a 'data transfer protocol'.  This document led to RFC 354.

RFC 196 (July 1971, Dick Watson) proposed a Mail Box Protocol.

So email was in people's minds from at least the middle of 1971.


To the extent that Steve gave advice or direction in March, 1973, it 
would have about priority of the standardization effort, not introducing 
the topic or need.  Note that by then, I suspect every Tenex on the net 
was using Ray Tomlinson's networked email enhancement.  (I don't 
remember when Larry Robert's RD MUA was developed.)


One bit of fallout, from the dust-up about the invention of email, that 
happened a few years ago, was Ray Tomlinson's commenting to me that what 
he did was in reaction to ongoing work by Watson, et al.  (Others had 
already heard this, but I hadn't.)  That work was in mid-/late- 1971. 
He didn't agree with the approach or goal their work had and thought 
something far simpler and fully online would be better.

By March, 1973, the challenge was not to do email, but to generalize the 
mechanism.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net