>David Lang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
>The e-mail system was developed in the days when reliable permanent
>connections were the exception rather then the rule. As a result the
>e-mail system was designed for any mail server to accept mail and attempt
>to deliver it to the destination. The idea being that hop by hop it would
>get closer until it reached the destination. Spammers are now taking
This is not correct. TCP was just as reliable in the early days of the
Internet as it is today. Most mail in those days was sent to its final
destination in a single client/server session just as it is today.
There was not a lot of hop-by-hop mail delivery.
The RFC821 specification for SMTP simply did not contemplate SPAM
mail. After all, in those days it was just one happy research
community. Open relays were convenient, since if you wanted to deliver
a mail message all you needed to do was find a host running SMTP and
let it handle the mail routing for you.
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
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