back to article If you love your email standards, SMTP your feet: 35 years later

This month marks the 35th anniversary of the sign-off of RFC 821, the first definition of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, that everyday staple of email comms. Although the original spec has long been superseded, with the latest version of SMTP being contained in RFC 5321, RFC 821 laid the foundations for the billions of …

  1. Alistair Mann

    Idea: user-defined whitelisting string.

    Tell your bank that email from them will only be accepted if the email body and/or header contains the provided string. If and when emailing you, the bank includes that string. Your email client, knowing your string, jettisons email not including it. Hey presto, more easily identified spam and phishes, at least until the next data hack.

    I plan to have HMRC include the string "The balance will be left behind the bar at the Winchester"

    1. Buzzword

      Already exists

      That user-defined whitelisting string already exists. It's called your email address.

      Without it, the email never reaches you.

      With it, the email does reach you.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Already exists

        "It's called your email address."

        And you set up one specifically for your bank (and others for each other correspondent you wish to verify). Added bonus: if it leaks you know who to blame.

        1. AndrueC Silver badge
          Alert

          Re: Already exists

          I've been doing that for several years now. It works very well for blacklisting and finger pointing. However I discovered recently that the finger pointing part can be flawed.

          In my case it seems that a forum I registered on several years ago got hacked. Some time later those credentials were used to log onto another forum and that email address used to send me spam.

          So whilst DEA did its job and pointed me at the correct site it was actually another site's lax security that led to the problem. And my lax security for opening the door by using the same credentials on different sites but most forums don't matter enough for me to care and the password was my lowest security password.

      2. James 51
        FAIL

        Re: Already exists

        I have had email accounts I have just created receive spam because the senders are sending out to random addresses not caring if they exist or not. Lets not forget companies get hacked and then the emails of their employees and customers get sold on so even if you're careful, that's no guantee that you won't receive spam.

        1. Christoph

          Re: Already exists

          "I have had email accounts I have just created receive spam because the senders are sending out to random addresses"

          They might just be able to hit some of the individual addresses I have set up, but the one I gave my bank is far too long and complex for them to hit it by chance.

    2. G2

      user-whitelisting

      here's a simpler idea:

      1) have an entire (sub)domain for yourself and set up a wildcard mailbox.

      2) make up a dedicated email address for anything that asks for you to provide an email address. Design the address JUST for that service and do not reuse it. Even if it's a printed form to fill in on paper, you can create an one-time-use email address on the spot just with a pen and paper.

      3) if that particular email address starts to receive spam it means that whoever you assigned that address has leaked it.

      since the (sub)domain is configured as a wildcard mailbox all emails arrive in a single central mailbox where a) it's first processed to clean obvious spam by the default server rules, and b) you can set up filters for each destination email "to:" address and apply labels or sort into folders for that topic (in your example, for mails from the bank)

      and bonus: it's all already possible.

      If you host that (sub)domain on Google's G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps) you can configure the Gmail service with a wildcard mailbox and do all of the above. It might work on other services too.

      Edit: P.S. wildcard mailboxes are different that Google's standard plus-alias addresses. Those still have an account name tag. In this case, wildcard really means wildcard, *@hosted.sub.domain.com

      1. DougMac

        Re: user-whitelisting

        >> 1) have an entire (sub)domain for yourself and set up a wildcard mailbox.

        And then get hit by a dictionary spam attack and get a few thousand spam crap in your mailbox.

        1. AndrueC Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: user-whitelisting

          And then get hit by a dictionary spam attack and get a few thousand spam crap in your mailbox.

          Nah. If your chosen format is multipart then it'd be an unusual dictionary attack.

          *@mydomain.com is vulnerable as you describe.

          MrWibble.*@mydomain.com

          Is nowhere near as vulnerable. It will only succumb to a dictionary attack if someone actually notices the prefix. Not saying they won't ever spot that but even if they do the only reason to dictionary attack would be to piss you off. There's just not much practical value in dictionary attacking a DEA system. And of course the solution is easy:

          MrWibble.*.v2@mydomain.com

        2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: user-whitelisting

          And then get hit by a dictionary spam attack

          At which point the anti-spam provisions on your firewall block the spam and blacklist the sender IP address..

      2. AndrueC Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: user-whitelisting

        1) have an entire (sub)domain for yourself and set up a wildcard mailbox.

        Exactly what I've been doing for many years now. I also run my own mail server because that's the only way you can be sure what the sender used as an address. You can't trust headers for that you need to see RCPT command to know for sure.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: user-whitelisting

        "make up a dedicated email address for anything that asks for you to provide an email address."

        That used to work on Demon until Vodafone outsourced their Demon domain email system to Namesco.

        The new system limits you to 100 email addresses - and a new one has to be pre-registered before you can send an email with it.

        On the useful side it does also bounce any incoming emails not in that set.

        The real negative is the slowness with which it refreshes an IMAP folder. Wouldn't survive even a mild flood. Namesco have also doubled their price for the email service this year to £61.

        1. G2

          Re: user-whitelisting

          Multi-quotes and replies below:

          quote:

          And then get hit by a dictionary spam attack and get a few thousand spam crap in your mailbox. /quote

          Google is expert at catching such dictionary attack spams. They never hit my inbox. I might get a few of them in the spam folder but once Google's servers figure it, it never even makes there - it helps them to train their spam filters. In addition to that, i have 1 TB of space allocated to the wildcard mailbox there. that can waste a loooooot of spammer time ... :D

          .

          quote:

          Some time later those credentials were used to log onto another forum and that email address used to send me spam. /quote

          there's a simple solution for that too: configure DKIM signing of all mails, set up SPF + a strict 100% DMARC reject policy that enforces DKIM+SPF. (this DMARC + DKIM + SPF authentication can also be configured on Google's servers too). Someone sending mails with fake 'from' addresses should not be possible if the domain is configured like this, they will hit a brick wall.

          Google's standard response for such messages looks like:

          550-5.7.1 Unauthenticated email from xyz is not accepted due to

          550-5.7.1 domain's DMARC policy. Please contact administrator of xyz

          550-5.7.1 domain if this was a legitimate mail. Please visit

          550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2451690 to learn about DMARC

          550 5.7.1 initiative. gsmtp

          After you set up DMARC you can then use a site like https://dmarcian-eu.com/ to help you visualize email traffic statistics from the DMARC reports. You can even see how many fake emails pretending to originate from your domain were received by the DMARC-compatible servers worldwide - google, yahoo/verizon/ microsoft, etc.. all major email systems will start sending you statistical data about email that pretends to be from your domain, including the ip address of the spam source.

          DMARCIAN is quite an interesting tool in analysing email spoofs reported via DMARC... in the last 30 days over 95% of the email spoofs that pretend to come from my domains (but are obviously not signed with DKIM and not a SPF match) are from India and Vietnam. Surprisingly, Iran is on 3rd place as a spoofing email spam source.

          For ISPs, top spammers in my statistics are from *.airtelbroadband.in followed closely by *.vnpt.vn (India and Vietnam again - not a surprise there)

          quote:The new system limits you to 100 email addresses - and a new one has to be pre-registered before you can send an email with it./quote

          who says you have to SEND from ALL those email addresses? most of them are intended to be receive-only anyway.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: user-whitelisting

            "who says you have to SEND from ALL those email addresses? most of them are intended to be receive-only anyway."

            There is an absolute limit of 100 preregistered aliases on the same Demon subdomain - irrespective of whether you use them to send or not. You still have to do a preregistration of the new specific address when you engage a new supplier etc via a form. That means logging in to Office 365 control panel and hunting for the right page to activate alias editing.

      4. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: user-whitelisting

        2) Feed anything that hits that address straight into SpamAssassin or whatever it is that you use to score your emails with.

      5. Vic

        Re: user-whitelisting

        have an entire (sub)domain for yourself and set up a wildcard mailbox

        Good god, no.

        If you accept all, you get inundated with spam.

        make up a dedicated email address for anything that asks for you to provide an email address

        That's what many of us do - but you allocate those addresses on demand by way of an alias.

        since the (sub)domain is configured as a wildcard mailbox all emails arrive in a single central mailbox

        The same is true of aliases - but you only get email to addresses you've actually configured.

        if that particular email address starts to receive spam it means that whoever you assigned that address has leaked it.

        And if you've implemented this with aliases, you can then kill that address without affecting any other operation.

        Vic.

      6. agurney

        Re: user-whitelisting

        "here's a simpler idea:"

        It's not new though, I've been doing that for the last 20 years.

        There is, however, a downside; there's a lot of random (though easily filtered) cr*p that arrives.

        Imagine taking all the possible slurped prefixes from @yahoo.com or @gmail.com and then finding them in the inbox for @your_domain

      7. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: user-whitelisting

        You don't even need a domain, just use plus-form addressing. Say you are G2@gmail.com.

        Tell El Reg you are G2+elreg@gmail.com. Tell Tesco you are G2+tesco@gmail.com. Tell your bank you are G2+53CR3T@gmail.com.

        All of those will find their way into G2@gmail.com and all you have to do is filter them. And if you get spam to one of them, you know which one leaked.

        1. P. Lee

          Re: user-whitelisting

          >And if you get spam to one of them, you know which one leaked.

          Wouldn't the spammers just see the "+" and delete it and everything up to the @ sign?

        2. G2

          Re: user-whitelisting

          quote:You don't even need a domain, just use plus-form addressing. /quote

          unfortunately the plus-alias method used by @gmail.com addresses is also known to spammers (d'oh!) and they routinely discard +anything from gmail email addresses that they harvest.

          this is why a wildcard mailbox is much more useful, because you can make it look like a regular email address without the need of such plus-aliasing tricks.

      8. P. Lee

        Re: user-whitelisting

        How about an extension to add (and collect) certificates to each email on a per recipient basis.

        Basically PKI but you give the recipient a certificate to use to communicate with you. Everone runs their own CA. If it gets compromised, you send them another one. It isn't perfect, but that's ok because it allows for graceful failure.

        It all boils down to clever address-books, which is why the idea will fail. Webmail halts the development of email in the same way that tablets and phones with hardware-based video decoding mean that developing new video standards is pretty much futile. The "winner-takes-all" cloud means you can't grow adoption of something.

        The internet was designed to be decentralised. That design is being increasingly over-ridden and its dangerous.

        /rant

    3. TheElder

      Idea: user-defined whitelisting string.

      I did that 20 years ago. The domain is not something I wish to reveal here. It is still in operation. I wish I could post pics of the nice javascript screen I used. The e-mail body must contain some sort of password, users choice. My idea at the time was to provide child safe e-mail. It worked well but with the onset of porn everything nobody seemed to care much anymore.

    4. Alumoi Silver badge

      If and when emailing you, the bank includes that string. Your email client, knowing your string, jettisons email not including it. Hey presto, more easily identified spam and phishes, at least until the next data hack.

      That's a capital idea. How do you propose we deal with banks selling that string to affiliates, business partners, subcontractors and being flooded with spam?

      Oh, I know, we pass a law that forbids banks doing that. Then we'll get another 'sorry, we've been hacked, it's not our fault' piss poor excuse.

  2. charlie-charlie-tango-alpha

    Re: RFC 2549 et al

    My favourite April RFC is Steve Bellovin's "The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header" (RFC 3514) from 2003.

  3. Lee D Silver badge

    A protocol that should have been obsoleted at least 15 years ago.

    Seriously, people, SMTP is the last major protocol that seriously needs a redesign from the ground up. From being able to fake return addresses, to no guarantee of end-to-end encryption, to all kinds of third-party DNS-based addons to try to reduce spam and forgery, to ancient file encodings, to even the concept of "bouncebacks", it's all archaic, problematic, and ripe for replacement.

    Someone really needs to propose SMTP2, which just fixes this junk, makes everything key-based (so you can't send from a domain unless you have the corresponding key, and not just "well, properly configured places may not accept your email" but actual protocol refusal), provides end-to-end encryption (put public keys in domain DNS for source and destination, sending server negotiates key-pair with end-recipient server and verify it's them that you're talking to using their DNS, then it doesn't matter WHAT mail servers it passes along the way, it can't be modified or snooped on en-route except by authorised systems), properly allows immediate response messages, you can put in explicit functionality for email-forwarding and rewriting if necessary (no reason that can't be done officially, with a full trace history, rather than just trying to tell the world that GMail may send emails on my domain's behalf), allow explicit refusal of email from unknown senders (i.e. they literally have to request permission first, if the user wants that, and are then given an explicit token that lets ONLY them send to you - "Do you want to accept email from hinet.net?" - answer No and there's no way for them to ever bother you again, even if they sell your email address), and turn it into what it should always have been: A transport system, that has no clue what it's transporting, just so long as it gets to the intended recipient, if they want it.

    Then all the SPF, DKIM, greylisting, spam filters, postmaster@, bouncebacks, message envelope rewriting, plain-text emails, mass CC:'s, and all the other junk that you have to deal with are consigned to the bin. Don't even get me started on bouncebacks-of-bouncebacks, each with a different format, reason and nothing you can do about any of them. Hell, even a "this email was received by the destination server successfully" binary indicator would be infinitely more use than just guesswork like it is now (just because your ISP mailserver said it would deliver it means nothing, you might get a bounceback an hour or even a day down the line saying that it couldn't talk to the end domain)

    Hell, if you made the initial SSL challenges hard enough, you can push spammers out of the market just by the amount of CPU they would have to expend on trying to talk to new users (while established users would already have a negotiated keypair that you could re-use for a period so as to not bog-down genuine servers sending to domains). And your Outlook could literally just store the keypairs of only the people you're interested in talking to, everything else just bounces off the server without you ever seeing it.

    SMTP needs to die like Telnet and FTP before it, and like plain HTTP now.

    And it's not that hard to put in a HUGE wishlist of things it shouldn't deal with at all, and things that it should, and instantly solve everything from spam emails, to email forgery, to botnet emails, to delivery-silence.

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      SMTP is the last major protocol that seriously needs a redesign from the ground up.

      IP was redesigned from the ground up to give IPv6 21 years ago. The highest adoption figure seems to be ~37% in Belgium, maybe 16% world wide according to Google's search requests.

      We'd end up with dual SMTP/SMTP2 systems for at least 30 years, which would be worse than the current problems.

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        We'd end up with dual SMTP/SMTP2 systems

        Indeed. We went through something akin to that when ESMTP came along. As an example, trying to send emails from a Solaris server to a server using Exchange 5.5 would fail silently since the Exchange server would advertise as ESMTP-capable and then silently ignore any ESMTP commands and drop any emails sent using pipelining..

        Took me a while to find out why emails were going astray. Telling sendmail to *never* use ESMTP to the specific E5.5 servers solved the issue.

        Now, it could be argued that the problem was Exchange 5.5 having an incomplete ESMTP setup (which was true) and the default being ESMTP was enabled (which was true) but it neatly shows how having multiple SMTP standards or extensions can be a problem.

        1. Lee D Silver badge

          And if it takes 30 years, where do you think we'll be in 2047 when someone STILL hasn't proposed an alternative and started deploying it? In exactly the same position.

          I'd rather have 10 years of it being "unheard of", 10 of it being "mixed" and 10 of it being "why aren't you using SMTP2 already?" than 30 years of "Oh, it's so hard to do and nobody will change".

          Seriously, I'd quite like to be able to send an email to my bank, lawyer or family without my ISP being able to read it. I don't think that's much to ask.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            "I'd quite like to be able to send an email to my bank, lawyer or family without my ISP being able to read it. I don't think that's much to ask."

            And you don't want to wait another thirty years?

            Then you very likely want something based on the solution that was tried, tested, and proven (but unacceptably expensive for wide deployment, not least because compute power and networking were unaffordably expensive at the time) in the 1990s.

            Sorry if I'm getting repetitive, but the modern IT/fashion industry's apparent need to re-invent wheels that were already working decades ago (and now need a bit of TLC) gets boring after a while, for those who just want "stuff that works".

            Reminder:

            https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/x400-messaging.html

          2. Vic

            I'd quite like to be able to send an email to my bank, lawyer or family without my ISP being able to read it. I don't think that's much to ask.

            I can do that - and I do.

            It's really not very difficult - but you'll have to run the encryption endpoint if you don't want your ISP to be involved. That's trivial...

            Vic.

          3. Down not across

            Seriously, I'd quite like to be able to send an email to my bank, lawyer or family without my ISP being able to read it. I don't think that's much to ask.

            PGP

            1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      SMTP: teletype-era protocol

      Well said that man, though I suspect very few people are listening, as ISPs and such largely seem to prefer cheap to effective/trustworthy (hey, other people can pick up the costs, right?), hence the bandaids on bandaids which form the 'modern' SMTP setup we all know (and very few, outside ISPs and other malware-flingers, actually love).

      SMTP comes from the era of the teletype when 4K wasn't the resolution of your TV screen, it was more like the amount of memory on most typical computers. Same goes for IPv4.

      It is overdue for a ground-up redesign, and it happened in the 1980s and 1990s, as did the replacement for FTP etc. For some reason it was mostly ignored, and still is (even more so than IPv6 is ignored).

    3. jake Silver badge

      There is nothing wrong with SMTP ...

      ... when used properly. Likewise, I still use FTP and telnet and several other protocols that kids today probably don't know exist. They all still have their place, quietly doing the job they were designed to do.

      Just don't tell Apple I have a dumb serial terminal attached to a port[0] on an aging iMac, with a nice friendly login prompt displayed for all to see ... They'd probably take me to court on charges of miscegenation or something equally daft.

      [0] With a little help from USB, of course.

      1. Down not across

        Re: There is nothing wrong with SMTP ...

        ... when used properly. Likewise, I still use FTP and telnet and several other protocols that kids today probably don't know exist. They all still have their place, quietly doing the job they were designed to do.

        No there isn't. I still run a gopher server for example. Yes I could convert or wrap it around http, but why would I when it works fine as it is.

        There is no need to go all Poettering on SMTP, it works fine.

    4. Trixr

      I don't know why all the downvotes - are any of these from anyone who works with a substantial email environment? (Multiple enterprises, or even medium-large enterprises?)

      I thought Google was on the right track with their Wave idea. Of course, their ramming it down everyone's throats and the fact Google were going to make it their proprietary thing meant its death-knell, deservedly so.

      But the idea of moving seamlessly between a IM conversation style to a message delivery system in "offline" mode (if you like) was great. How the security and connection handshake could be handled with multiple providers is something else, because of course Google weren't designing for that either. Something like the messaging equivalent of Diaspora (the social media platform), where multiple nodes can intercommunicate, perhaps.

      I know that some would say it'd be overly complicated, but if anyone thinks that pure SMTP is workable these days, they're dreaming. Multiple message formats, multiple mail access protocols, bolt-ons (and they ARE bolt-ons) like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the gymnastics required to encrypt messages and the transport layer, SenderBase, RBLs, etc etc etc etc.

  4. Alan Brown Silver badge

    The spam problem: older than you might think.

    https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc706.txt

    Nov 1975

    1. Mage Silver badge

      Re: The spam problem: older than you might think.

      Spam started in UK when telegraph terminals could be installed outside of post offices. In the Victorian era.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: The spam problem: older than you might think.

      To be fair, Jon was discussing misconfigured servers spewing unintentionally, not intentional sending of junk email.

      The first actual "spam" that I'm aware of was sent on ARPANET, mid 1978. If you're interested, search for "Gary Thuerk". I didn't get my copy of the email, alas (my bozo filter worked!), or I would copy & paste it here. Gary got yelled at, none of the rest of us ever tried anything as daft.

      I remember a student at Stanford sending every email account on campus a "wanna buy my bike?" email back when I was stanford!sail!vax!jake (address changed to protect the guilty; I'm archived at DejaGoo under the real one) ... Probably 1982 or thereabouts. He got yelled at, loudly, and had computer privileges revoked for the rest of the year.

      After that? Probably the first real spam was on Usenet in late 1993 or early 1994. (Religious crap, and a bot kibozing on the word "Turkey"). Followed, of course, by the infamous "Green Card Lottery" spam.

      For modern email? Soon after Usenet ... I'm guessing late 1994 or early 1995.

  5. ForthIsNotDead

    Penny mail

    Companies that want to send you email can do so, but it will cost them one penny, or a tenth of a penny, or whatever - it doesn't really matter.

    If you open/read the email, they get their penny back. If you don't, they don't; the penny goes to charity.

    That will soon stop spam.

    1. Vic

      Re: Penny mail

      That will soon stop spam

      No it won't.

      The *vast* majority of spam is sent from forged addresses through armies of compromised machines.

      So if you charge for email - it is those compromised users who pay, not the spammers.

      Email micropayments has been suggested about a billion times as the FUSSP. It doesn't work. Not even a bit.

      Vic.

      1. G2

        Re: Penny mail

        the forged address problem is easily solved by a strict DMARC policy that enforces DKIM + SPF.

        It's been years since Google / Yahoo / Microsoft implemented support for these but each domain owner is responsible for configuring the DMARC protection for their domain. The defaults are to not enforce anything.

        1. natfal

          Re: Penny mail

          The forged problem is not solved by DMARC/DKIM.

          1) It depends on the recipient knowing what domains actually belong to the purported sender. Quick, which of these are valid paypal domains?: paypal-communications.com, paypal-prepaid.com, paypal-payments.com.

          2) Also, phishing studies (such as those from APWG) show that phishers don't bother spoofing the From: header address because most users don't bother checking. Simply putting the email address in the display name is more than enough to fool people.

          3) It assumes DKIM/DMARC/SPF is properly implemented, which is a huge assumption.

        2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: Penny mail

          strict DMARC policy that enforces DKIM + SPF

          Ha ha. Don't make me laugh (no, really, don't).

          Back in the mists of time when SPF was new I happily configured it for all of the domains that I handle email for. Nowadays I don't bother because the majority SMTP sewers (Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo) ignore it utterly when sending email[1].

          And I can't think of any email host outside of Western Europe or North America that actually uses it.

          [1] They seem *slightly* more keen on implementing it on the receiving side. But only slightly.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Penny mail

      Charging money for sending emails is not viable for various reasons. However, the concept of charging *processing time* is a good one, because it wastes spammers time. See "Hash Cash" for the principle involved.

      Tarpitting and Greylisting are available techniques for slowing down, or forcing a spammer to repeat their submission respectively, but I've found that many mail servers are configured not to tolerate these techniques. Cloud email used by legitimate senders in particular thwarts greylisting because each time an email is resent from a cloud service it likely comes from a different IP address to the previous message which means that the recipient mail server thinks it is from a different source.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Penny mail

        "[...] because it wastes spammers time. "

        Same with landline cold calls. Some of the recorded ones don't appear to terminate the call. If you then leave the phone off-hook there is no dial tone - and hopefully you are stopping them using that outgoing line until you hang-up. If anyone desperately wants to ring me there is always the mobile as back-up.

      2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: Penny mail

        Tarpitting and Greylisting are available techniques for slowing down

        And getting your domain(s) blacklisted..

  6. Daggerchild Silver badge

    GOTO 10

    It's a testament to the complexity of the application server/cloud stack these days that I'm seriously considering automating an information interface to users via email, like we did in ye olde days (who remembers FTP-by-mail gateways?). That's a doddle to write, and small enough to actually be securable.

    All I have to do is work out which mail encryption/authentication works for people using Outlook....

  7. Joe Gurman

    "[N]obody disputes that email is an indispensable part of everyday modern life."

    I think my texting-only kids, both in their 20s, would disagree.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The youngsters who communicate with me - talk to most people with SnapChat or WhatsApp They only use email to me because I don't have a smartphone.

    2. nijam Silver badge

      > I think my texting-only kids, both in their 20s, would disagree

      ...because they don't realise that SMS is a botched, inadequate version of email?

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        because they don't realise that SMS is a botched, inadequate version of email?

        More like a botched, inadequate version of the old "tell" command.. (or "net send" for you modern types..).

        ObObscureFact: I worked at Motorola in the mid-90's, during which time our programming team wrote the first SMS-handler for Cellnet. It ran on the big[1] Solaris servers in our computer room..

        [1] Big in size as well as in (for then) computing power. I suspect my smartphone has more storage and processing power than those servers.

  8. schaafuit
    Trollface

    creeping featurism

    The only, shared, design flaw in 822 and SMTP is, IMO, the rather vague

    distinction between headers and envelope. Fixable by including the

    envelope as a distinct part of the message.

    The rest is window dressing. And creature feep.

    1. schaafuit
      Facepalm

      FU: creeping featurism

      Oops, ,s/Trollface/Facepalm/.

  9. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    So to sum up.

    Internet email was invented by Mr Postel.

    Come on, did no one think that mildly amusing?

    Email does have to get upgraded, especially establishing who really sent it and in transit security.

    We no longer live in a world where people can be trusted only to send "safe" messages and neither can the relay stations between them and us be trusted to either not peek nor actively change the message.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Email does have to get upgraded

      "Email does have to get upgraded, especially establishing who really sent it and in transit security."

      The 1980s called. They'd like to remind you that X.400 etc did that, and more, and was tried, tested, largely proven, and massively unpopular, because (a) it cost money to implement - a *lot* more money than the almost-free zero-trust RFC-based "solutions" of the time (b) doing it properly required knowledge and trust and organisation, and ...

      Sod it, nobody's paying attention, even though the email problem won't go away till SMTP largely goes away, and the answer has been staring people in the face for three decades or so. And now that lots of people can actually see the costs of SMTP's limitations, things still won't change because the people paying for SMTP's limitations aren't the same people/budgets as are still deploying SMTP-centric "solutions".

      Now that the value of trustworthiness and robustness is somewhat better understood, it might have been hoped that someone would resurrect the interesting bits of X.400 - by another name if the X.400 name isn't fashionable enough (ffs how can SMTP still be *fashionable* in 2017?).

      Further reading includes:

      https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/x400-messaging.html

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Email does have to get upgraded

        But...doesn't X.400 security and non-repudiability of email require an X.500 directory service? Someone would have to maintain a federated global directory so that everyone could talk to everyone else.

        Having said that, I am slightly nostalgic for the days of X.400/500. I still have a copy of the Chadwick book somewhere.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Email does have to get upgraded

          "Someone would have to maintain a federated global directory so that everyone could talk to everyone else."

          That was the general idea - someone *trustworthy* would have to do it, so that folks who actually cared about email could *trust* that their incoming messages were *trustworthy* e.g. that they came from who they said they came from, and hadn't been tampered with during transmission, and ... and that their outgoing messages couldn't be read by people not authorised to read them and... y'know, stuff that people might want from an actual properly designed, rather than built-from-bandaids, email (and more) system.

          Those who didn't care about such trivia (internet "service" providers, spammers, marketeers, etc) could still use insecure teletype-era technology. There were, and presumably still could be, gateways between the two worlds.

          1. nijam Silver badge

            Re: Email does have to get upgraded

            > someone *trustworthy* would have to do it

            Who would you propose? Microsoft? The Chinese government? A Nigerian prince (apparently several of them are out of work)?

            And if SMTP is bad, webmail is worse. But it looks nicer and has a bigger attack surface, so yeah, let's do that.

            1. Vic

              Re: Email does have to get upgraded

              And if SMTP is bad, webmail is worse

              It doesn't have to be.

              I run webmail for my main email interface. The difference is that it's *my* webmail, running on *my* server.

              Vic.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: someone trustworthy

              "Who would you propose? Microsoft? The Chinese government?"

              Surely some piece of BT would take on the job. Or local equivalent elsewhere in the world. Maybe GCHQ? NSA? We trust them, don't we?

              But seriously, in a trusted email system you've ultimately got to trust someone or something.

              Why do so many people trust HTTPS, certificates, Windows Update, and such? SMTP doesn't - can't - even come anywhere close to that level of trustworthiness.

              It's architecturally impossible to trust an SMTP-centric setup; far too many holes.

              Lots of water has passed under that particular bridge in the last 30 years, if the "who do you trust" problem is not already acceptably sorted for email then maybe some clever people could come up with something that (e.g.) doesn't rely exclusively on trusting one untrustworthy organisation, maybe even a scheme which can cope with a small proportion of involved organisations "going rogue" and failing to fulfil their obligations for whatever reason.

              1. Vic

                Re: someone trustworthy

                Why do so many people trust HTTPS, certificates, Windows Update, and such? SMTP doesn't - can't - even come anywhere close to that level of trustworthiness.

                Yes it can. SMTP can be conducted over TLS with certificate verification in exactly the same way that HTTPS is done.

                Most people don't do this, but that doesn't make it impossible.

                Vic.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: that doesn't make it impossible.

                  You're quite right Vic, but the fact that so few people do what you're doing, even among those who *could* do it, is a strong hint that something different might suit the vast majority of people who want trustworthy email.

                  Does TLS with certificate verification etc also sort issues like 8bit cleanness and multilanguage support and other trivia?

                  1. Vic

                    Re: that doesn't make it impossible.

                    the fact that so few people do what you're doing, even among those who *could* do it, is a strong hint that something different might suit the vast majority of people who want trustworthy email.

                    I couldn't possibly agree.

                    What it says to me is that far too few people actually give a shit about trustworthy email.

                    This is borne out by other abominations - like the number of domains that publish an SPF record of "v=spf1 +all" [1].

                    Vic.

                    [1] I was seeing this so often that I've actually modified my SPF milter to read "+all" as "-all". Life's a lot quieter...

        2. Down not across
          Pint

          Re: Email does have to get upgraded

          Having said that, I am slightly nostalgic for the days of X.400/500. I still have a copy of the Chadwick book somewhere.

          I just had a flashback of ALL-IN-1, DEC MAILworks and DEC Mailbus.

          I need one, no wait, quite a few of these -->

      2. David Roberts
        Windows

        Re: Email does have to get upgraded - OSI

        Upvote for remembering X.400.

        An enormously over designed (for the time) protocol where all (most of?) the issues which are now bubbling to the surface from the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach of the RFCs were thought through in enormous detail.

        RFC based development was proper quick and dirty continuous development without a scrum in sight.

        The "do one cool thing and do it quickly" approach ensured that simple (as in SMTP) protocols were easy to implement and adopt and spead often via groups of enthusiasts. A friendly environment where you were just happy that you managed to transfer a message or a file and didn't worry that 10 years down the line someone might try to do bad things.

        One of my favourite protocols was Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) which was developed because the average PC just didn't have the power to run the OSI stack and the people selling dedicated cards with the stack on were total fucking bandits. A few years later LDAP had added back in all the major features of DAP and was a more heavyweight implementation than the original DAP.

        Sigh.

        Kids of today......

        Anyway, simple protocols are massively abused these days but even X.400 which was based on each nation(al Telco) running the top level administrative domain (ADMD) through which all international traffic flowed assumed good will on the part of the nation. Consider how popular it would be today if all your emails had to be approved by da govmint.

        It would stop SPAM for the most part but could well be too high a price to pay.

        Yes, I know abour PRMD to PRMD connections but for real freedom of communication not much beats just having to know the IP address of the target server and going direct with no intermediaries. Which avoids beurocratic overheads but as a side issue allows easy abuse. Which includes SPAM. Which is where we came in more or less.

        Anyway, time for a glass of warm milk and my nap........gah!....bloody kids on my lawn again......

  10. RonWheeler

    It is beyond fixing

    Yes, it is just about tolerable with a lot of best-guess extra layers. But fundamentally it is crap. No, I don't have an easy fix that doesn't involve big brother or someone making a fast buck.

  11. Throatwobbler Mangrove

    What does smtp stand for? I asked my first box.

    Sado-masochstic toilet paper, he said.

  12. JLV

    >nobody anticipated how badly the internet would come to need secure comms

    He's not the most obviously technical of authors, but William Gibson has been remarkably prescient about the degree of adversity on networks and computers as connectivity and complexity goes up.

    Neuromancer is pushing 33, and most of the short stories in Burning Chrome came out before 1982 so SMTP contemporary.

  13. T. F. M. Reader

    Another RFC worth mentioning,

    still surprisingly relevant but almost completely unknown by today's youth, is RFC1855.

    From 1995. Ah, memories...

  14. JJKing
    Facepalm

    Oh crap.

    Now I have the bloody Village People chanting away on my head with:

    I sent the mail using S M T P ♫ etc etc

    1. Down not across
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: Oh crap.

      Thanks a bunch.

      That reminded of INS' OSPF Song

      Young man, are you tired of rip, young man..

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like