<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 2:13 PM <<a href="mailto:arnold@skeeve.com">arnold@skeeve.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> ... </span>CSNet didn't happen until the mid-80s, by which time<br>
sendmail was firmly entrenched in the BSD world. <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> ...</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div><font color="#0000ff"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span>R<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">ight -- my bad.  CSNET did not occur until</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> a few years after I had finished </span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">my grad work and left</span>.  <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I</span>STR <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">CSNET </span>used MMDF<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> as the mail transport agent</span> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">(</span>not sendmail<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">)</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">.</span>  But my point was that there were numerous alternate mail systems, commercial and independent, that had "portals" into and out of the USENET and the ARPANET and later the Internet<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> - so email headers were getting warped in strange ways and trying to be able to reliably reply was often difficult.</span></font></div><div><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div><font color="#0000ff">Eric was having to deal with some new hacks fairly regularly, and the idea of a production language to convert <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">format </span>A to B to C was a good one.  The only real mistake in my mind was that (unlike MMDF) he built the SMTP daemon in sendmail. MMDF and some of the other systems had programs that converted to/from a <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">canonical </span>form (usually RFC733/822 style) and the<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">n some sets of external utilities </span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">that</span> talked to the "port" - be it UUCP, SMTP, <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"PhoneNet", </span>or whatever.   <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span><span class="gmail_default" style="">But</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> making it built into sendmail itself</span>, in fact<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">,</span> was a violation of the UNIX "do one job well" idea and would, of course<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">,</span> be the attack vector<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">.  </span> The two sad parts of that IMO <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">is that first most people did not need most of the features of sendmail -- they needed just SMTP and maybe UUCP, but send sendmail was the SMTPD for BSD, that is what they had.  But the BBN TCP/IP package that UCB started with had a separate SMTPD and Eric could have just called it like he did the UUCP subsystem.</span></font></div></div></div><div hspace="streak-pt-mark" style="max-height:1px"><img alt="" style="width:0px;max-height:0px;overflow:hidden" src="https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aY2xlbWNAY2NjLmNvbQ%3D%3D&type=zerocontent&guid=6ef302a5-f13b-49a7-b1c3-3d9147abe90e"><font color="#ffffff" size="1">ᐧ</font></div>