[ih] Internet mail in the 80's

[Craig Partridge]

Hi Bob:

UUCP gateway and internet email gateway became effectively the same thing
c. 1987.  That was quite a change.  It used to be that you'd have to route
to an UUCP host that was connected to ARPANET, so some set of bang paths
to, say, seismo, which would then interpret the remaining address as an
Internet address.  Email gateways spent a lot of time crafting return
paths, so someone could reply to a message that originated on a different
network.

But the combination of domains names, and pathalias (I think that's the
name - in any case, work by Honeyman and Bellovin to automatically route
within the UUCP network), and MX RRs in the Internet world (which allowed
us to email to domains that weren't on the Internet [yet]) meant you could
email to someone at 3com.com from UUCP, Internet, or CSNET (and later
BITNET) and it just worked!

This was intentional and reflected considerable work by folks to make all
the parts integrate well during 1986 and 1987.

Craig

On Thu, May 21, 2026 at 3:27 PM Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> When I was at 3Com on email, we had an employee, Marc Lavine, who set up an
> email gateway for us. This would have been 1986-87 or so. I'm not in touch
> with Marc anymore.
>
> I remember absolutely *nothing* about it, except a vague recollection that
> we called it "the UUCP gateway." Do you think that's what it was, rather
> than "an Internet mail gateway"? It was not offered to customers and I
> don't think any of them ever asked for it.
>
> It was not very heavily used -- that I remember.
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