My apologies -- I should have been more precise about chronology.
When we _first_ did mail-over-FTP, the norm was to deliver more
or less directly into the user's file system. The notion of
"spooling" or "mail store" mail-receiving processes came later --
in the Multics case, not much later, as it became clear that
direct-to-user-space delivery raised some security issues that no
one was happy about-- but well before SMTP.
So Dave, and his chronology, are quite correct.
john
--On Saturday, 27 January, 2001 06:26 -0600 Dave Crocker
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 03:14 PM 1/26/2001 -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
>> With FTP, the mail was delivered more or less into the space of
>> the receiving user. So any conversations that were done (and I
>> can't remember much, if anything) would have needed to be done
>> in what we would now call the receiving MUA -- there really
>> was no _mail_ transport process.
>
> architecturally, the MAIL commands within FTP were identical to
> SMTP. They were an email transport protocol.
>
> Both delivermail/Sendmail and MMDF were alive an kicking before
> RFC821. The introduction of SMTP did not alter the roles or
> basic system processing of either of these applications. It
> just added one more transport protocol to their set. That is,
> however we would characterize their behaviors now, such as
> distinguishing activities within the MUA versus elsewhere -- it
> was the same before SMTP.
>
> There were other email processes that worked the same way, but
> the only one I know any details about was the MMDF predecessor
> that we did at Rand in 1978. My impression is that the Multics
> NCP email software had a similar architecture.
