RFC 915 (rfc915) - Page 2 of 11

Network mail path service

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