[ih] Why it happened the way it did? [was Re: OpenPGP and email lists]

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Crocker via Internet-history <dcrocker at bbiw.net> said:
>Besides that, I suspect some credit should accrue to a rather obscure, 
>contemporaneous accomplishment that Craig Partridge consistently cites:  
>Getting multiple, heterogeneous email networks to agree to use the DNS 
>MX record for public routing.

It is pretty impressinve that 40 years later, SMTP mail is still the only
truly federated service we have.

XMPP sort of was for a while, but it failed when a major provider named
after a large number for some reason make incompatible changes in their
implmentation and the service fragmented and died.

R's,
John