6 Jul
2019
6 Jul
'19
11:57 a.m.
On Jul 5, 2019, at 5:05 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Here's pot stirrer for a holiday Friday afternoon:
How many different protocols / methods can we collectively come up with for how email can
be transferred?
I'm primarily thinking about between servers (MTA-to-MTA). But I'm also willing
to accept servers and clients (MTA-to-MUA). Where you can / could run at least one server
yourself.
There's the MAIL-11 protocol (end to end, no MTAs) and the DECmail protocol which may
be some OSI-like thing, I'm not sure anymore.
For real strangeness there is the PLATO mail protocol, which involves writing the mail
into files, which are then extracted from PLATO into the OS file system by a periodic
batch job, then sent to another system via file transfer (FTP or a predecessor), then
pushed into the PLATO file system, then picked up by a mail agent at that end. Ugh.
paul