[TUHS] Mailer History -- was Berkeley CSRG Building

[George Michaelson]

Many people lived with mbox as an intermediate delivery form and then did
post fact rewrites on the /var/spool/user file.

I continue to use (n)MH reading from Imap sources with an oauth2 provider
and my mail is in maildir as an intermediate state, very annoying.

I liked mmdf, much because I liked the people who worked on it. Steve Kille
in UCL and Julian Onions in Nottingham amongst others. Marshall rose may
have had a bit of it, and Doug crocker. Smart people. Better coders than me
by far!

G

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024, 16:44 Dan Cross, <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 3:06 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 2:13 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> >> ... CSNet didn't happen until the mid-80s, by which time
> >> sendmail was firmly entrenched in the BSD world. ...
> >
> > Right -- my bad.  CSNET did not occur until a few years after I had
> finished my grad work and left.  ISTR CSNET used MMDF as the mail transport
> agent (not sendmail).  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 - so email headers
> were getting warped in strange ways and trying to be able to reliably reply
> was often difficult.
>
> I tried to set up MMDF on an RT running AOS once; this was during the
> era when Sendmail was getting hacked nearly continuously.  It was kind
> of a nifty architecture; different formats used different "channels"
> feeding into a common routing core.
>
> It sort of broke down because the inter-message separately wasn't
> compatible with any clients we were using; they didn't use the BSD
> "mbox" format, but rather, used a set of (4?) `^A`'s as the message
> separator.
>
> I'm sure there was some way to change this, but I never investigated
> sufficiently to figure out what it was.
>
> > Eric was having to deal with some new hacks fairly regularly, and the
> idea of a production language to convert format 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 canonical form (usually RFC733/822 style) and then
> some sets of external utilities that talked to the "port" - be it UUCP,
> SMTP, "PhoneNet", or whatever.   But making it built into sendmail itself,
> in fact, was a violation of the UNIX "do one job well" idea and would, of
> course, be the attack vector.   The two sad parts of that IMO 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.
> > ᐧ
>
> Zmailer had an architecture kind of like that; at least some folks
> were running it locally. But it never really caught on, as far as I
> could tell, and eventually qmail and postfix (nee vmailer) provided a
> better alternative. I guess some folks still swear by Exim.
>
> I kind of wonder if the days of Unix MTAs as anything other than a
> detail are mostly over.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
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