On 2018-09-20 11:06 p.m., James Knott wrote:
On 09/20/2018 10:50 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Well, yes it was, back in 1982; see RFC821 and /etc/services but that was "simple" and 'unauthenticated' and "insecure" and hence it was hacked and abused, so we don't use that any more. We use TLS instead.
1982 was before most people had access to the Internet or email
Compared to today that is true but the time-line is that IBM released the PC 19 1980, Apple the MAC in 1984 (remember the advert?). IBM officially released the Ethernet card in what? 1984/5, I was at one of the release presentations in Toronto. Apple had Ethernet long before IBM officially had it. The saw networking, even in only in their own way, about the time that the PC third parties did. 1n 1982 I was working for a company porting UNIX to the (various) PCs that were coming out. We had a commercial internet connection, via a couple of universities, as well as supply UUCP connections to to all the employees who had PCs and a few dozen other 'friends and relatives' of the company. In those days there were millions of students with email and NNTP accounts at or via universities. UUCP was available for PCs as well. There were actually quite a number of non-university/commercial sites such as The Law Society of Upper Canada. Then there were bulletin board! AND set up CO+RE to officially do what DARPANET had already done at that was assume commercial nodes. Well before the end of the 1980s there were many version of UNIX, SCO being the most popular, running on PC machines.
and smtp was used between host computers using smtp only. There weren't a lot of PCs doing email in those days.
Not as SMTP, but using BBS and using UUCP, well, that's is a different matter.
At work, back then, we did email on a VAX 11/780, using terminals to connect to the VAX. The pop rfc is over 2 years newer than smtp. So, back in those days, email generally meant people using terminals to a shared Unix system, with smtp transfering mail between systems. Mail with a system didn't need smtp or pop. There were also commercial networks such as Compuserve, Telenet, etc. that did email, but they were all proprietary. The company I worked for provided Telenet in Canada. Even then, it wasn't until 1989 that I used a PC for email.
OK, so I had access to experimental and delivered UNIX on PCs and PC-like machines and IP on Apples before then. I know I was not alone in this. The use of port 25 persisted well after CO+RE into the early days of the Global Internet. During this era Canada was de-regulating the phone service and there were a lot of 3rd party supplies. In 1988 I saw one or these, Fhonorola out of Ottawa, act as a Canadian replier of ANS's CO+RE service and got an experimental 56K link to my basement and was one of the first e-commerce business in Ontario by 1990. As the universities dropped their UUCP accounts for old IT students we took the supporting them instead. Dial-up IP was still experimental. but there must have been, all in all perhaps the better part of 1,000 UUCP nodes in the Greater Toronto area, talking to each other, talking to the universities, talking to their employers, and as the commercial Internet emerged to the number of ISPs that were appearing. All the while SMTP was using port 25 and a lot of the smaller machines became clients. I recall in 1992 hold a email conversation using telnet on port 25 with a contact at Cambridge university in the UK in near real-time. But yes, most people were using client and many were using email accounts at their ISP's server. Webmail was yet to evolve. Then the Gold Rush happened. The thing about a Gold Rush is that it is rarely the miners and prospectors that get rich, and only a few of their immediate suppliers survive in the long run, though a few might make a packet if they know when to get out. No, there are really only two groups who make it big during the Gold Rush: the bankers and the scam artists, the con men. OK, if there's a government to bail them out then the banks always make it big. And a lot of con men relay on inadequate proof of identity or credentials. Which using port 25 and the basic SMTP protocol allowed. So it is in the class of "yes it used to be but we changed all that". And the process of tightening up email identification and authentication to fight spam in its various forms is an ongoing battle. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org