[ih] Ancient mail question about 551 and 251 reply codes

[John Levine]

It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>I don't recall that we ever actually received any such errors from other 
>SMTP systems on the Arpanet.   Few other systems seemed interested in 
>going beyond the very basic mail functionality that had started as a 
>simple addition to FTP.  Our mission in Lick's group was to research 
>human-human communications.  Other sites on the network were focused on 
>other research topics.

OK, thanks.  That's about what I expected.

>We also lobbied for electronic "stamps" as a way to provide some 
>back-pressure as a limiting mechanism for spam.  No one like that either.

E-postage is the bad idea that just won't go away.  I wrote a white paper
on it 20 years ago.  Nothing has changed since then except that you might
add a few zeros here and there:

https://taugh.com/epostage.pdf

R's,
John

>If you can find archives of the "HEADER-PEOPLE at MIT-AI" mailing list, it 
>would be a good source of such historical artifacts about email.

I downloaded the copy someone else posted about.  The only reference to
251 and 551 are in a draft of what became RFC 1123.