Subject: Protocol Action: Message Submission to Proposed

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 08:45:55 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Message Submission'
<draft-gellens-submit-13.txt> as a Proposed Standard. This has been
reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group.
The IESG contact persons are Keith Moore and Patrik Faltstrom.

Technical Summary

This protocol makes it possible to create an MSA (Message Submission Agent)
in a proper and standardized way using standard SMTP, i.e. to be able to
create an easier way for a client to send / inject SMTP messages into
the normal mail routing environment. This even though the client might
connect from networks not being considered "home". A client should
according to this paper use the authenticated SMTP extension to
authenticate at the MSA, and by doing that making the MSA accept incoming
messages, even though the destination is not "local" (i.e. authenticate to
allow relay of email).

Working Group Summary

It has been discussed for a long time how the initial step of injecting
messages into the mail routing environment should be done. Because SMTP is
the transfer protocol in use, and nothing else exists, adding
authentication to SMTP helped this paper being created. One person strongly
opposed the idea that SMTP should be extended this way, and it was pointed
out -- and agreed upon -- that a general submission protocol should be a
better solution, but as nothing else exists today, not even as an idea, it
was the consensus that submission via SMTP is the way of going.

Protocol Quality

The protocol has been reviewed by Patrik Fältström. There is strong support
for this extension from the vendors of mail clients that have had a problem
with roaming clients, i.e. clients connecting to home from all over the
Internet.