RFC-224
by Darius Kazemi, August 12 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Renting mail boxes
RFC-224 is titled “Comments on Mailbox Protocol”. It's authored by Alex McKenzie of BBN and dated September 14, 1971.
The technical content
The author would like to note that the Terminal IMP (TIP) as introduced in RFC-215 will be unable to provide a mail box under the proposed Mail Box Protocol. This is because the TIP can't operate as a server in any capacity, and at any rate it's not ever going to support the File Transfer Protocol, which is a new requirement as of RFC-221.
McKenzie isn't saying this is a reason to scuttle the Mail Box Protocol, but he says that TIP users should be able to “rent” a mail box on a more powerful server which they could then Telnet to and access their messages.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.