[ih] Fwd: Design choices in SMTP

[Craig Partridge]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 2:24 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> On 2/8/2023 1:02 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
> >
> > Here RFC 354 (THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) and RFC 385 (COMMENTS ON
> > THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) are missing, the latter includes MAIL
> > and MLFL.
>
> Count me as both befuddled and embarrassed.  No idea why/how I missed 385.
>
> I left off 354 because it doesn't provide any email protocol specification.
>
> The fact that 385 explicitly specifies MAIL and MLFL makes the fact that
> neither are in the RFC 542 version of FTP quite odd..
>
>
My recollection, from the digging into this that I did for the article on
the history of email for IEEE Annals,  is there
was a tension between the FTP and email teams.  There was a meeting about
FTP at MIT in March 1973 (that led to 542) where the FTP team
had decided to punt on email issues, only to have their DARPA PM (Steve
Crocker) show up and tell them that email mattered.
After the meeting, the group decided (in some sense, flouting Steve) that
email should really be in a separate annex and left email
commands out of RFC 542.  (As I recall, they were on a page by Jon Postel
in the ARPANET Protocol Handbook but may be misremembering).

Craig

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