RICH.GVT@OFFICE-3.ARPA (Rich Zellich) (03/07/84)
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