Red Hat® Linux® 7 Unleashed

A Brief History of Internet Email Standards

Electronic mail or email is arguably the most useful application of the Internet. (Yes, even more so than the relatively young World Wide Web.) Since the Internet's inception, there have been many public open standards published, which are called Requests for Comments (RFCs). Many of these RFCs were (and still are) related to email standards. The SMTP specification originally started with the Mail Transfer Protocol in 1980, evolved into Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) in 1981, and since has been enhanced into the protocol we know today. (See http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html.)

Introduction to sendmail

During this time of rapid change in email protocols, one package emerged as a standard for mail transfer. ...