Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!bbn.com!craig
From: craig@bbn.com (Craig Partridge)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Dial up access to Internet facilities
Message-ID: <56756@bbn.BBN.COM>
Date: 30 May 90 12:20:44 GMT
References: <1990May25.163528.14300@ameristar> <9005270423.AA19852@psi.com> <1990May29.191125.9800@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@bbn.com
Reply-To: craig@ws6.nnsc.nsf.net.BBN.COM (Craig Partridge)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 20

In article <1990May29.191125.9800@portia.Stanford.EDU> morgan@jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan) writes:
>
>Indeed, SMTP's assumption that everybody's connected all the time
>doesn't work well with occasionally-connected hosts.  It would seem
>that the time is ripe for some sort of extension to SMTP to do
>receiver-initiated transfers to meet this need.  Of course you'll
>still need the MXing host to hold your mail for you.  Presumably
>getting away from uucp is one of the points of all this.

CSNET did this some time ago with MMDF2b.  Some of the dial-up sites run
a script every night which brings up the dial-up line, and then opens
a connection to a port on relay.cs.net and tells it to start delivering
mail to the site.  The application at that connection starts up the
appropriate MMDF channel (mmdf can have multiple SMTP delivery channels,
where a channel typically has messages destined for a particular site),
which delivers the mail to the site.  [Note there's no security problem
here -- anyone can start up the channel, but the channel will only deliver
to the proper remote system(s)]

Craig