Editing Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (section)

=== Original SMTP ===
In 1980, Postel and Suzanne Sluizer published {{IETF RFC|772}} which proposed the Mail Transfer Protocol as a replacement for the use of the FTP for mail. {{IETF RFC|780}} of May 1981 removed all references to FTP and allocated port 57 for [[Transmission Control Protocol|TCP]] and [[User Datagram Protocol|UDP]],<ref name=jp>{{Cite report |url=https://doi.org/10.17487/rfc0821 |title=Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |last=Postel |first=J. |date=August 1982 |publisher=RFC Editor}}</ref> an allocation that has since been removed by [[Internet Assigned Numbers Authority|IANA]]. In November 1981, Postel published {{IETF RFC|788}} "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol".

The SMTP standard was developed around the same time as [[Usenet]], a one-to-many communication network with some similarities.<ref name=jp/>

SMTP became widely used in the early 1980s. At the time, it was a complement to the [[UUCP|Unix to Unix Copy Program]] (UUCP), which was better suited for handling email transfers between machines that were intermittently connected. SMTP, on the other hand, works best when both the sending and receiving machines are connected to the network all the time. Both used a [[store and forward]] mechanism and are examples of [[push technology]]. Though Usenet's [[Usenet newsgroup|newsgroups]] were still propagated with UUCP between servers,<ref>{{cite web| url = http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Usenet-News-HOWTO/x64.html| title = Tldp.org| access-date = August 25, 2007| archive-date = August 17, 2007| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070817090558/http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Usenet-News-HOWTO/x64.html| url-status = live}}</ref> UUCP as a mail transport has virtually disappeared<ref>{{cite web| url = https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barber-uucp-project-conclusion-05| title = draft-barber-uucp-project-conclusion-05 – The Conclusion of the UUCP Mapping Project<!-- Bot generated title -->| date = December 19, 2000| access-date = August 25, 2007| archive-date = October 13, 2007| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20071013094756/http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barber-uucp-project-conclusion-05| url-status = live| last1 = Barber| first1 = Stan O.}}</ref> along with the "[[bang path]]s" it used as message routing headers.<ref>The article about [[Sender Rewriting Scheme|sender rewriting]] contains technical background info about the early SMTP history and source routing before {{IETF RFC|1123}}.</ref>

[[Sendmail]], released with [[Berkeley Software Distribution|4.1cBSD]] in 1983, was one of the first mail transfer agents ([[Message Transfer Agent|MTA]]) to implement SMTP.<ref>{{Citation| author = Eric Allman| year = 1983| title = Sendmail – An Internetwork Mail Router| series = BSD UNIX documentation set| publisher = University of California| location = Berkeley| url = https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/09.sendmail/paper.pdf| access-date = June 29, 2012| archive-date = May 20, 2013| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130520171455/http://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/smm/09.sendmail/paper.pdf| url-status = live}}</ref> Over time, as BSD Unix became the most popular operating system on the Internet, Sendmail became the most common mail transfer agent.<ref>{{Citation |author=Craig Partridge |year=2008 |title=The Technical Development of Internet Email |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=3–29 |publisher=IEEE Computer Society |series=IEEE Annals of the History of Computing |doi=10.1109/MAHC.2008.32 |s2cid=206442868 |url=http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/email.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110512165437/http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/email.pdf |archive-date=May 12, 2011 |df=mdy-all }}</ref>

The original SMTP protocol supported only unauthenticated unencrypted 7-bit ASCII text communications, susceptible to trivial [[man-in-the-middle attack]], [[Email spoofing|spoofing]], and [[Email spam|spamming]], and requiring any binary data to be encoded to readable text before transmission. Due to absence of a proper authentication mechanism, by design every SMTP server was an [[open mail relay]]. The [[Internet Mail Consortium]] (IMC) reported that 55% of mail servers were open relays in 1998,<ref>{{cite web|author=Paul Hoffman|date=February 1, 1998|title=Allowing Relaying in SMTP: A Survey|url=http://www.imc.org/imcr-006.html|accessdate=2010-05-30|publisher=[[Internet Mail Consortium]]|archive-date=March 5, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305105916/https://www.imc.org/imcr-006.html|url-status=live}}</ref> but less than 1% in 2002.<ref>{{cite web|author=Paul Hoffman|date=August 2002|title=Allowing Relaying in SMTP: A Series of Surveys|url=http://www.imc.org/ube-relay.html|url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20070118121843/http://www.imc.org/ube-relay.html|archivedate=2007-01-18|accessdate=2010-05-30|publisher=[[Internet Mail Consortium]]}}</ref> Because of spam concerns most email providers [[blocklist]] open relays,<ref>{{Cite web|date=2007-06-17|title=In Unix, what is an open mail relay? - Knowledge Base|url=http://kb.iu.edu/data/aivh.html|access-date=2021-03-15|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070617083024/http://kb.iu.edu/data/aivh.html|archive-date=June 17, 2007}}</ref> making original SMTP essentially impractical for general use on the Internet.