Re: User authentication

• From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
• Date: Mon, 29 May 1995 17:49:50 +0100
• To: www-talk@www10.w3.org
• Message-Id: <199505291649.RAA20521@gizmo.lut.ac.uk>

Kee Hinckley writes:

| On the mail side I believe there is a POP3 extension which allows sending
| mail. Since POP requires a password that might meet your needs. However I
| suspect you'll have trouble convincing browser authors to support a feature
| that has a rather restricted domain like that.

I was thinking more in terms of the browser inserting a magic cookie 
in outgoing (SMTP and/or NNTP) messages, rather than using a 
different protocol to send the messages

e.g.

  X-Sender: nazgul@utopia.com (verified)
  X-Mailer: ACME WebGobbler

So the aim is really to discourage the casual user from mucking 
about, since their real identity will be stamped on the messages they 
send

And the code to implement this using the authentication elements of 
(say) POP, IMAP or FTP would be quite, quite, trivial

Martin

Received on Monday, 29 May 1995 12:50:06 UTC