RFC 915 (rfc915) - Page 2 of 11
Network mail path service
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 915 Month Year
Network Mail Path Service
provided to make it easier for people to address mail to
non-ARPA-Internet hosts. The result, for a variety of reasons, has
been the work and development of the Domain Name system and
facilities [2, 3, 7, 9], and it is expected to make mailbox addresses
be as simple as the current ARPA-Internet mailbox format (e.g.,
"user@domain").
How do people discover the special encoded addresses for
non-ARPA-Internet host mailboxes until the domain name system is
working and covering the majority of hosts in the mail world? The
proposed solution to this problem is to provide a network service for
the ARPA-Internet and a mail service for the non-ARPA-Internet hosts
that, given a host and an optional addressing system or communication
protocol or some other piece of information, supplies the mailbox
address format for sending mail to that host. For example,
"LNET" would be translated by the server to
"nedved%A". This memo covers the
proposed network service.
DOCUMENT CONVENTIONS
Unless otherwise noted, all numbers are in decimal.
The term "host", as used in this document, describes one computer
system which may have more than one name associated with it. It may
have a name for each network or mail connection it supports and may
have several nicknames or aliases for the computer and/or for each
set of network names that the computer has acquired.
OVERVIEW
The network service is a connection based application on TCP [4]. A
server listens for TCP connections on the assigned port of 117 [8].
It responds to the connection with a coded greeting message and waits
for a command line. For each command line sent to the server, the
server will respond with a coded message. The special command QUIT
causes the server to respond with a coded closing message and closes
the connection.
Elvy & Nedved