RFC 458

Mail Retrieval via FTP ✨

okay bestie, here's the title block first 🎀

• RFC 458, titled Mail Retrieval via FTP 🌸
• Network Working Group 💖
• Authors: B. Bressler (BBN-NET) and B. Thomas (BBN-TENEX) 🫶
• NIC: 14378
• Date: 20 February 1973 🦋
• Category, obsoletes, updates: the original doesn't list a category or status, and it doesn't obsolete or update anything 💅

We're proposing two brand-new FTP commands, ReaDMailFile and ReaDMail 🧚. They're meant to be symmetric with the current MLFL and MAIL commands, so it all feels like one family 👑. They'd let a user read his mail at one or more sites without the overhead of logging in, and without having to juggle several different retrieval methods 😭. The user could even go further and make a program that goes around to all the server sites and grabs his mail for him 🌈. The current FTP mechanisms provide for password protection, should security be required 🔐.

okay this next part is a lot 🙈 This proposal brings back into focus, once again, the problems of different users with the same ID, and (to a lesser extent) one user with multiple IDs. This RFC doesn't try to address those issues right now, since a lot of effort is already going into them 💅. But we believe a satisfactory system for network mail should include a mechanism that lets each user have mail for him sent to a single repository (ideally, the site of his choice) ✨. We also believe the two commands proposed here would be useful in that kind of environment, as well as in the current network environment 🌸.

The format of the commands is

   COMMAND    REPLY
              success        fail

   RDMF       200,250,330    433,450,451,454,455,457,500,507
              secondary replies:
              252            452

   RDML       152,330        433,450,451,455,500,507

The success reply 200 would take the text NO MAIL NOW 💌. For the RDMF command the mail itself is transferred over the data connection, and the FTP replies come over the TELNET connection 🦋.

For the RDML command both the mail and the FTP replies come over the TELNET connection 💜. The reply 152 is a new code meaning mail text follows the text that follows may be NO MAIL NOW 🎀. It's giving new reply code energy, iykyk 👑.

[This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry] [into the online RFC archives by Helene Morin, Via Genie 12/1999] 🌈