9 Jul
2019
9 Jul
'19
6:14 a.m.
On Jul 8, 2019, at 11:27 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
On 7/6/19 12:57 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
No mail servers. You address mail to node::user and it contacts the mail protocol
listener at that node, which drops the message into the mailbox of that user on that
system.
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.
I guess I don't know enough about MAIL-11 to understand why you say end-to-end / no
MTA. Was DECmail the OSI X.400 email implementation that
DEC produced (I think) in the '90s?
Yes, in ALL-IN-ONE and the like. An interesting point is that it was not really accepted
as the internal mail tool (except by some corporate overhead departments); engineering
persisted in using MAIL-11 based email on the internal network.
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.
$ReadingList++