Amazing - thanks so much! -pete Sent from my iPhone

Erik - great job - nothing to quibble about, here adding a little color. On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 4:16 AM Erik E. Fair <fair-tuhs(a)netbsd.org> wrote: Ing70 via a VDH interface to LBL was rather late in the ARPANET history. UCB was supposed to have its own connection earlier, but for reasons I never knew, it did not happen. I understand that it was targeted to be installed in the computer center, and UCB politics somehow waylayed it. When the Ingres contract was let, the Ingres team got the VDH connection as a part of it. No other systems could connect to the ARPANET. As Erik mentioned, in '78 Eric Schimdt's MS thesis work was developing the RS-232C 9600 baud "Berk-Net" for three machines -- 2 in Evan and then a wire in the steam tunnel that Bob Kridle pulled allowed them to connect the Cory Hall70, which was the "student" system that was were the primary work for 1BSD and 2BSD occurred (ex/csh et al.). Bob later ran a serial line up the stairwells of Cory and picked up the Ingres and the first CAD machine. Kurt Shoens, who was the primary UCB Mail author, hacked the Berknet support into his work. One of his primary additions was removing the "delivery" part of the mail into a separate program - that he called "delivermail." Eric Alman was the system administrator of Ing70, so Eric hacked delivermail to pass email to and from the Berknet to the ARPANET. All was good until Ernie covax showed up and was connected to the UUCP net ;-) Eric refers to that time as "the email format of the week" and sendmail was created to allow him to more easily handle the different formats. By then there was the DARPA 733/822 format (user@host), Berknet (host:user), UUCP (host1!host2...!hostn!user) being sources at UCB, as well as crap showing up from the IBM Educational System, CSNET and various other places trying be exchanged. Ah .. but CS was a division of EECS -- very interesting history about that. The EE Dept was considered top three in the country and #1 by many ratings. They already had a huge history of working with industry and had created the Industrial Laison Office (ILO - which was how the UNIX BSD tapes were distributed until the creation of CSRG and a factoid. The ILO folks advised Fabry on how to run CSRG)). When CS was created, it was forked from the Math Dept. But, the Regents felt that if the CS was to have a chance to become a top 10 program, it needed to be put under the auspices of the EE Dept like MIT was -- and was attached to EE -- hence EECS. I could be wrong - but ISTR, there was an IBM 360/370 system down there also. The 70s were used to teach CS courses such as the one I taught -- I think Bart Miller, Mike Carey and I taught CS-40 a qtr or two after Erik was an undergrad. Actually, not at all, which was all the more amazing. There were just CAT3 twisted pair with no conditioning. When we had an electrical storm, it was not usually to have the replace the 488/489 transcievers in the DHs or DZs. Kridle got pretty adept and putting machines sockets into the boards and he kept a box of chips in his office. It was initially with 3Mbit Xerox boards. We were a little itchy about that, so Bob got an optical coupler/repeater (I assume from Xerox, but I don't know) in Cory's CAD machine room. The 10M stuff came about two years later, originally 3COM equipment with. There was a LAN in the Ingres machine room, another in the CAD, and another in CSRG's in Evans. The UCB CAD machine was on all three networks as it was in the middle. That is why Sam wrote the original routed stuff -- based on things he had seen at PARC for PUP.

Luther Johnson <luther.johnson(a)makerlisp.com> wrote: This was carried even further in Plan 9, making it possible to transparently network systems of different architectures. Arnold

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 at 14:31, <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: I believe the most recent version is preserved at https://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume25/ease3.5/ There are also older versions in that same archive if for some reason they are of interest. -Henry

On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 2:13 PM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: 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. 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

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(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 11:44 AM Rich Salz &lt;rich.salz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: As always, it's about history and how they got there. What was reasonable for one group, over time was not for another. To be fair, that was Bruce Borden-ism from the Rand Mailer Handler (MH). Longer before things LIKE Ease/MMDF *et al*., Rand was running UNIX machines on the ARPANET early on (and UUCP did not yet exist). The mailer header format needed to be RFC733 in those days. The use of the "UNIX" headers - was rather limited to a couple of programs in the Fifth and Sixth Edition. Bruce had replaced the Fifth and Sixth edition "mail" program (which was both the MUI and MTA combined), with separate programs already as part of creating this new user interface and mailer agent. Thus, a new mailbox format was fair game. It was not a failure of imagination, binary was not an issue for Bruce - since it was not allowed in RFC733 at that point. Now, remember that many UNIX folks on the ARPANET had already switched to MH (that's why we switched to using it at CMU), so MMDF picking Bruce's format was a good idea (for them). Remember, AT&T Research is not on the ARPANET, so the mail (local to a single machine in those days) could be in any format they wanted. RFC733 (and later 822) headers were not an issue, so the funky "From:" worked fine. As I pointed out, UCB was not on the ARPANET, so when Kurt wrote the UCB MUI and split out the MTA as delivermail, he kept the V5/V6 mailbox format ( mbox) from Research. The issue came when people started using the mail system as a programmatic messaging scheme (*i.e.,* fork: some_program | mail user) and other programs started to parse the output. More importantly, getting an ARPANET connection was difficult, so many fewer sites needed to support the ARPANET (later Internet) header format, whereas a USENET connection via UUCP was easy. So >>lots<< of people started to pick up Mail(1) [Kurt's new MUI) and did not use/know about, much less need to switch over to MH and RFC733/822. Thus, the switch from the Research "mbox" format to Borden's scheme started to become problematic in that if the new utility "knew" about mbox, it had to be hacked if you were using MH or something that was derived from MH (like MMDF or PMDF). ᐧ ᐧ

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:18 PM Steffen Nurpmeso &lt;steffen(a)sdaoden.eu&gt; wrote: Page 3 of SMTPD -- RFC 821 [which the 822 sits on top of says]: "Commands and Replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character set. When a transport service provides an 8-bit byte (octet) transmission channel, each 7-bit character is transmitted right justified in an octet with the *high order bit cleared to zero*" BTW, this was specified in 821 because it had been a factor in earlier experience of the ARPANET [733 and using FTP as a mail transport, which was how much of this all started], and binary was explicitly not allowed. 822 force 7-bit ASCII because of the earlier issues of things like CDC's display code (what a nightmare), much less EBCDIC. The key was that those of us in the ARPANET community could not allow "anything," - but we did have to detail what was there. Some of us lived in this world and wrote programs that dealt with those constraints at the time. I am relaying to you what it was and how it happened. As I said, we have what we have because that was what we were living with -- two distinct worlds, the ARPANET community - which was setting the standards for interchange, and UNIX (USENET), which was de facto and growing because it cost little to join it. Ouch -- I was part of POSIX and /usr/group before that. And had >>nothing<< to do with it. The POSIX definition was at least 15 years After Bruce wrote MH and Kurt did delivermail and if I count I >>suspect<< it is correctly closer to 20-25. mbox was created I believe by Ken (Doug do you remember?), but I'm not sure who actually wrote the original "mail" program for Fifth edition (maybe Fourth) - which as I said was both an MUI and a MTA. But that development was over 15 yrs before we started the /usr/group standard, much less the POSIX ones. You are probably correct that until it was formally specified in the POSIX definition, the format was defined originally in Ken's code, then Kurt's and finally in Eric's. IIRC, Bruce actually had a man page in MH that described his format that used the ^A characters, but I would have to rummage through old sources to be 100% certain. Certainly, later distributions of it did describe it, and MMDF may have also - but I'm not sure. BTW: by about 4.2BSD time (maybe a little earlier), particularly because of sendmail - the MH system (which had left Rand and was then being supported by someone else ??UC Irvine maybe??) had been hacked to handle the mbox format ᐧ

Clem Cole wrote in &lt;CAC20D2O33LZvF2-gn2J8yB_84jk8jfPAdgsvyT476qv54o9U1w(a)mail.gmail.com&gt;: |On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:18 PM Steffen Nurpmeso &lt;steffen(a)sdaoden.eu&gt; \ |wrote: |> Depending on what you mean by "at that point" i think here you |> misremember. (To the contrary 733 and also 822 allow practically \ |> anything |> |Page 3 of SMTPD -- RFC 821 [which the 822 sits on top of says]: | |"Commands and Replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character |set. When a transport service provides an 8-bit byte (octet) transmission |channel, each 7-bit character is transmitted right justified in an octet |with the *high order bit cleared to zero*" Sure, that is the 8-bit thing that i introduced into the discussion. You all were talking about binary, which means "lots of non-printable characters". |BTW, this was specified in 821 because it had been a factor in earlier |experience of the ARPANET [733 and using FTP as a mail transport, which was |how much of this all started], and binary was explicitly not allowed. 822 |force 7-bit ASCII because of the earlier issues of things like CDC's |display code (what a nightmare), much less EBCDIC. The key was that those |of us in the ARPANET community could not allow "anything," - but we did |have to detail what was there. Ok, mails had to be transferred somehow. So without binary transport no binary storage. (RFC 822 allows any ASCII character, except that CRLF ends a line.) |Some of us lived in this world and wrote programs that dealt with those |constraints at the time. I am relaying to you what it was and how it |happened. As I said, we have what we have because that was what we were |living with -- two distinct worlds, the ARPANET community - which was |setting the standards for interchange, and UNIX (USENET), which was de |facto and growing because it cost little to join it. | |> As a remark, the MBOX format as standardized by POSIX decades ago |> |Ouch -- I was part of POSIX and /usr/group before that. And had >>nothing<< |to do with it. The POSIX definition was at least 15 years After Bruce |wrote MH and Kurt did delivermail and if I count I >>suspect<< it is |correctly closer to 20-25. mbox was created I believe by Ken (Doug do you |remember?), but I'm not sure who actually wrote the original "mail" program |for Fifth edition (maybe Fourth) - which as I said was both an MUI and a |MTA. But that development was over 15 yrs before we started the |/usr/group standard, much less the POSIX ones. That all is very interesting. For now i always presumed s2/mail.c was mostly written by Ken Thompson? Yes, Research V5 already did some sort of From_, and ensured a blank line when doing concat() onto the target users "MBOX" file. |You are probably correct that until it was formally specified in the POSIX |definition, the format was defined originally in Ken's code, then Kurt's |and finally in Eric's. IIRC, Bruce actually had a man page in MH that |described his format that used the ^A characters, but I would have to |rummage through old sources to be 100% certain. Certainly, later |distributions of it did describe it, and MMDF may have also - but I'm not |sure. The difference, and what i meant, is that POSIX says "one or more header lines". Compare this to Kurt Shoen's ishead() from 1978, where he only tests a single line by itself. (But "From " plus date plus user of maximally 17 bytes is still better than five times ^A i would think, except that consecutive ^A are rare.) So i would think the problem stems from the fact that in early [mM]ails there was no separating newline in between the "From " line and message text *unless* there was some header to put: fprintf(fout, "From %s %s", myname, date); puthead(hp, fout); while ((c = getc(fo)) != EOF) putc(c, fout); -> puthead(hp, fo) struct header *hp; FILE *fo; { if (hp->h_to != NOSTR) fprintf(fo, "To: %s\n", hp->h_to); if (hp->h_subj != NOSTR) fprintf(fo, "Subj: %s\n", hp->h_subj); if (hp->h_cc != NOSTR) fprintf(fo, "Cc: %s\n", hp->h_cc); if (hp->h_to != NOSTR || hp->h_subj != NOSTR || hp->h_cc != NOSTR) putc('\n', fo); return(0); } So there *could* be no separating empty line after the (so-called) From_ line. This actually changed with POSIX, and it took more than fourty years until Werner Fink pointed to the fact that this "one ore more header lines" can be taken into account when doing From_ line detection in a MBOX file. Or 31 years, if it was POSIX 1988 which brought that rule. For a later born one - it is de facto hard to understand why noone cared for some sort of content encoding for neither of SMTP nor text messages. I mean, if one reads the early RFCs, before 1975, say, it was all unbelievable "direct", trial and error, discovery, etc. But, take for example RFC 698 from July 1975, "TELNET EXTENDED ASCII OPTION", which says Several sites[.] for example MIT-AI, use keyboards which use almost all 128 characters as printable characters, and use one or more additional bits as "control' bits as command modifiers [.] several characters cannot be entered as text because they are used for control purposes, such as the greek letter "beta' which on a TELNET connection is CONTROL-C and is used for stopping ones job. Ie "control by external player" was not only the usual thing, but it was recognized as causing problems. It is fascinating to read Postel's RFC 767 from 1980, "A Structured Format for Transmission of Multi-Media Documents". To the contrary it took until the early 90s until it was no longer expected that receivers "know" (like RFC 767, which assumes users know how to interpret data formats to the odd bit) by converting data to harmless text "garbage" which needs dedicated and declared support on the receiver side to become interpreted. And i hope IETF's new thing SML will not bring back such. - Why the 8-bit problem, at all? Already RFC 354 says: The transfer byte size must be 8 bits. It is really amazing that in hindsight to data formats like RFC 767 encoding for (the) local storage (that) MBOX (is) was not worth an RFC. (Until MIME came which *i* use to circumvent any possible problem; it must be said that especially in the OSS world people *explicitly* do not do this, so that messages with >From quoting, aka *without* MIME, can still be seen.) |BTW: by about 4.2BSD time (maybe a little earlier), particularly because of |sendmail - the MH system (which had left Rand and was then being supported |by someone else ??UC Irvine maybe??) had been hacked to handle the mbox |format These days anyone runs away from MBOX. Even the dovecot IMAP(++) server no longer uses it (by default) i think, since not too long ago. I think they all went the Maildir way, which also stores one message per file. I love MBOX (with MIME encoded messages etc), however i -- for the MUA i maintain -- still have the way to go they all have passed, and that is external index files etc. Netscape's mailer had that thirty years ago... --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:47 PM Rich Salz &lt;rich.salz(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Rich, that was a much later version. ᐧ

On Wednesday, August 14th, 2024 at 9:45 AM, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: Mail as IPC...that's what I'm reading from that anyway...now that's an interesting concept. Did that idea ever grow any significant legs? I can't tell if the general concept is clever or systems abuse, in those days it seems like it could've gone either way. I guess it sorta did survive in the form of automated systems today expecting specially formatted emails to trigger "stuff" to happen. - Matt G.

On 2024-08-14 12:20, Clem Cole wrote: Another correction: I wrote syslogd as part of the delivermail/sendmail project, but I did intentionally make it generic so it could be used by other services. Interestingly, I even got it to work on v6 using something called "mpx files". eric

arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: CSNet had a dialup POTS based service, PhoneNet, using MMDF. I think that was Boston University's 4.2BSD VAX 11/780's primary email connection until we got an Internet connection via Cypress(*) c. 1986, initially using an 11/725 (a re-packaged 11/730), running, I think, Ultrix. Back in the day, global email was a maze of twisty passages with gateways between the worlds of The ARPANET, BITNET, UUCP, CSNet, etc, and which required excruciating navigation with percent signs used for manual routing, tho sendmail configs would route user(a)host.BITNET etc to the right gateway with the right incantation. Often, but not always, a simple reply would work, but sometimes the rewrites didn't get the sender address right... (*) https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1565&context=cs…

thank you. ᐧ On Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 5:08 PM Eric Allman &lt;tuhs(a)eric.allman.name&gt; wrote:

On 2024-08-16 17:47, George Michaelson wrote: Ah yes, I was trying to remember JANET but was too lazy to do the research. Honestly, I thought that JANET got it right and the rest of us different, so that: user(a)top.middle.bottom (e.g., eric(a)edu.berkeley.cs) would allow strict left-to-right parsing. Actually I wanted cs.berkeley.edu:eric — if that was true everywhere, sendmail would have been so much easier. A major reason for very generic rewriting rules is that basic parsing algorithms (notably LALR(1)) couldn't be made generic. At Berkeley uunet!foo!bar(a)berkeley.edu meant that the message should be sent to the UUCP host (ucbvax at the time, iirc, which from Ing70 translated to "ucbvax:uunet!foo!bar"), but host::user@decwrl.com should be sent to decwrl unchanged. See the book "!%@:: A directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" for a taste of just how bad it was. Heh. It reminds me of some of Teus Hagen's escapades in the early days. But Teus was earlier, when networking meant UUCP. eric