[ih] SMTP History

[Paul Ruizendaal]

> There is this code from 1981:
> 
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-Vax-TCP/src/mtp

I had a quick look through this code. The original poster may find some answers in this code as to what came before SMTP.

The code seems to have its roots in 1976, written by Steve Holmgren -- one of the authors of “Arpanet Unix”. It seems to have originally used FTP as its transport. Later additions are support for TCP instead of NCP, and support for MTP instead of FTP. When compiled for NCP, it seems to have first tried delivering via MTP and failing that falling back to FTP.