Dave Crocker

David Howard Crocker is an American network engineer known for his work on networked email since the early 1970s, when he worked on ARPANET as an undergraduate at UCLA. As a researcher at RAND Corporation he designed the MS Personal Messaging System, and while pursuing graduate studies in computer science at the University of Delaware from 1978 to 1982 he developed MMDF, a message transfer agent for email servers that he ran as a telephone based ARPANET gateway for CSNET. He was the author of RFC 822, published in 1982 to define the format of Internet mail messages, building on the earlier RFC 733 he had co-authored in 1977; by 2022 he had authored 68 RFCs in total. He was co-architect and director of system development at MCI Digital Information Services, working with Vint Cerf to build the MCI Mail national email service, and he later held networking engineering management positions at Ungermann-Bass, The Wollongong Group and Digital Equipment Corporation before founding his own consultancy, Brandenburg InternetWorking, in 1991. He served as one of the original IETF Area Directors from 1989 to 1995.