The Internet Message

This last book of the Marshall Rose trilogy takes us back to his original point of entry into the Internet community — back to his roots, so to speak. Those early days in 1981 and 1982 are deeply engraved in my memory, as I played the role of pied piper with ARPANET mail to lure Marshall into the technology and politics of internetworking, and then together we the drew the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine into the great world of academic networking. First with an early CSnet dialup "phonenet" connection for network mail, and then with a home-grown split IP gateway research project. The rest is history.

Little did you all know what was being hatched for the Internet community, for the OSI movement, for Internet network management, for OSI directory service, and for computer network mail. I should admit that we did not really see it all coming, but I cannot say that we were blind to the directions that were taken. All along, it was clear that "the game was afoot", and that Marshall was going to play a major role in shaping the future of global networking.

So here we are, with Marshall telling us all about Internet mail, and between the lines educating is about networking issues in general, and explaining many general principles of how things should (and should not) be done in networks.

I am sure you will find The Internet Message both educational and entertaining. This whole networking business is much too deadly serious to be presented without some delicious humor. You will find it packaged as soapboxes, which reminds me of yet another interesting story…

1. Introduction
1. A Model for Message Handling
2. The Internet Suite
1. The Early Years
2. Architectural Model
3. Development and Standardization
3. Technology Perspective
1. OSI's Message Handling System
4. Roadmap
2. Naming and Addressing
1. Domain Names
1. Writing Domain Names
2. Topological Independence
3. Delegation of Authority
2. The Domain Name System
1. Design Criteria
2. Domain Name Space
3. Resource Records
4. DNS Interactions
5. Using the DNS
6. Zones of Authority
3. Finding Information
1. Finding a Particular Site
2. Finding a Particular Person
3. An Automated Approach
4. Technology Comparison
3. Message Formats
1. A Memo-Based Format
1. Writing Electronic Mail Messages
2. Structured Header Values
2. MH: A "Multifarious" User Agent
1. The MH Philosophy
2. MH Command Handling
3. MH Format Handling
4. Relationship of MH to the Model
3. User Agent Functionality
1. Message Generation
2. Message Examination
3. Message Processing
4. Other Headers
1. Trace Headers
2. Miscellaneous Headers
5. USENET Messages
1. USENET Headers
4. Mail Transports
1. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
1. SMTP Envelope
2. Protocol Interactions
2. UUCP
1. Transporting Mail
3. Transporting News Articles
1. Using Remote Execution or Mail
2. Using the Network News Transfer Protocol
4. Implementation Issues for Message Transfer Agents
1. Size Limitations
2. Queue Management
3. Command Handling
4. Pipelining
5. Mailing Lists
5. Technology Comparison
5. Mailbox Services
1. The Final Delivery Process
1. Delivery to a User Agent
2. Delivery to a Mailing List
2. Post Office Protocol
1. Design Criteria
2. Protocol Interactions
3. An Example Interaction
4. Non-Standard Facilities
3. Other Approaches
1. Interactive Mail Access Protocol
2. Distributed Mail System Protocol
6. Multi-media Mail
1. Multi-Media Body
1. Content Types
2. Content Transfer Encoding
3. Miscellaneous Information
4. A MIME-capable User Agent
5. Relationship of MIME to Other RFCs
6. Message Transfer Agent use of MIME
2. Non-NVT ASCII Headers
3. Technology Comparison
7. Privacy-Enhanced Mail
1. Overview
1. Design Criteria
2. Writing Privacy Enhanced Messages
1. Privacy-Enhanced Messages
2. Exterior Messages
3. Interior Message
4. PEM and MIME
3. PEM Concepts
1. Algorithms
2. Key Management
4. PEM Services
5. PEM Infrastructure
6. For Further Reading
8. Mail Gatewaying
1. Theory of Mail Gateways
1. Basic Principles
2. Imprecise Mappings
3. For Interested Readers
2. Mail Gateways in Practice
1. Example 1: Envelope Fixation
2. Example 2: Header Examination
3. Example 3: Uniformity of Translation
4. Example 4: Header Mapping
5. Example 5: Message Body Translation
3. Technology Comparison
9. On the Horizon
1. Lessons Learned
2. New Directions

1. Relevant Internet Documents
1. Administrative RFCs
2. Electronic Mail RFCs
3. Contact Information
2. How to Get MIME Software
3. The Future of OSI: A Modest Prediction
1. Introduction
2. Where Are We Now
1. The Network Layer
2. The Flagship Application
3. The Flagship Application (cont.)
4. Other Applications
5. The Proof of the Pudding
3. What Is Wrong?
1. The Process
2. Other Approaches
3. Does it have to be that complicated?
4. Conclusions
1. In Closing

A good primer on SMTP and related technologies.