On Sep 1, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Peter wrote:

> I want the internet to be able to transport *only* emails with
> one verifiable origin and one verifyable destination.

You know, that's the way things behaved on the ARPANet back before
TCP/IP, when mail was a sub-function of the FTP protocol.  It didn't
work very well with mailing lists; nearly melted down the net. :-(
The follow-on protocols ALL recognized the need for a way to transfer
the (large) data portion of a message separately from the list of
recipients at each host.  Of course, they didn't foresee spam, and
the net has changed a lot since then, but I still can't see increasing
the bandwidth requirements of mailing lists by 100x or so :-)  
(Although,
it would be interesting to see statistics on number of recipients per
"data" transaction in the modern internet.)

> Mailing lists could be run by appointment with the
> administrator of the originating server.

NNTP, more or less?  It seems to place a rather heavier burden on the
originating server and administrator.

Even in the early days, it was pretty clear that you needed to be able
to support mailing lists in a "low profile" way that did not require a
lot of administrator support on either the server or (especially) the
recipient's machine...

(we need to move this off of [PIC] tag pretty soon.)

BillW
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