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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!RICH.GVT@OFFICE-3.ARPA
From: RICH.GVT@OFFICE-3.ARPA (Rich Zellich)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: smtp, errors and delivery and authentication
Message-ID: <[OFFICE-3]GVT-RICH-490UQ>
Date: Tue, 6-Mar-84 16:13:00 EST
Article-I.D.: hou3c.382
Posted: Tue Mar  6 16:13:00 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Mar-84 07:53:16 EST
Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
Lines: 19
To: Header-People@MIT-MC

Mark Crispin seems to be the only one who understood that the key word in my 
message was "authentication".  Yes, I know that technically mail is not really 
authenticated (except that it \is/ to a great extent by addition of the Received
lines and the Return-path building).  The point is, that in an official-business
environment, \reliability means not only the ability to deliver the mail, but 
also to get it there with a reasonable indication of who really sent it/.  
Getting mail from a host your mail-receiving server can't identify may not be 
the best idea in the world (and with name servers coming online along with 
domains, a hosts private name table shouldn't be the cause of wrongly-rejected 
mail).

Sometime in the future, of course, we must add \real/ authentication (and real 
security, real precedence, ...).  Right now, the official policy when sending 
official direction via netmail is to follow it up with a TWX.  In practice, 
unless it's fairly important, only the net message is used; this is because most
of the users don't understand how easily a message can be forged on many 
systems, and because they haven't yet been bitten by a forged message.

-Rich