JARRELLRA@VTMATH.BITNET (Ronald A. Jarrell) (10/29/86)
Does anyone besides us set up userid's with in authorize or mailuaf that
forward to mailing lists? In other words sending mail to STAFF
would cause mail to be distributed to half a dozen people? I have a problem
with doing it across networks. If STAFF is on VAX1, and I'm on VAX2,
and I send mail from VAX2 to VAX1::STAFF the first 2 people on the list
get the message, and anyone who had forwarding set gets the message regardless
of where they were. No one else does. The nonpriv account gets a timeout
error (actually I only got a timeout once). Usually it gets ABORTED LINK with
no indication as to why. After 4 and half months of explaining this
to DEC, the last month of it to a very helpful person in colorado who spent
a week calling my system, DEC decided the following 2 things:
a) It's broke.
b) It's not supported so they could care less.
Any ideas on a way to fix this? It only happens when the transport is
DECNET, i.e. bitnet mail, csnet mail, etc all work fine with the forwarded
lists, cause they are executed locally. Also the following syntax works:
@vax1::staff.lis (if list contains host::user addresses, ours doesn't)
The above syntax executes the list processing on vax2.
The following doesn't work:
vax1::@staff.lis
(execution done by vax 2).
-Ron JarrellLEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA (10/31/86)
Does anyone besides us set up userid's with in authorize or mailuaf that
forward to mailing lists? In other words sending mail to STAFF would
cause mail to be distributed to half a dozen people? I have a problem
with doing it across networks. If STAFF is on VAX1, and I'm on VAX2, and
I send mail from VAX2 to VAX1::STAFF the first 2 people on the list get
the message, and anyone who had forwarding set gets the message regardless
of where they were. No one else does. The nonpriv account gets a timeout
error (actually I only got a timeout once). Usually it gets ABORTED LINK
with no indication as to why. After 4 and half months of explaining this
to DEC, the last month of it to a very helpful person in colorado who
spent a week calling my system, DEC decided the following 2 things:
a) It's broke.
b) It's not supported so they could care less.
To answer this one more time: The MAIL-11 protocol on which VAX MAIL is based
is very simple-minded. In particular, it has a very limited error reporting
channel: The receiver can send back (essentially) a single bit that indicates
if delivery was successful, and an uninterpreted text message to be given to
the sending user. There is NO WAY to send back multiple status messages.
When the MAIL-11 protocol was developed, mail forwarding didn't exist; for
that matter, neither did mailing lists, though they got added pretty quickly.
The combination of the two is something the protocol - drawn up for informal
use by a couple of engineers who wanted to connect their machines 10 years
ago - never anticipated.
In summary:
- It works fine when there are no errors;
- It fails when there ARE errors, of any sort. I can't explain
the particular errors you are seeing without looking more
closely at your system, but it's probably a result of the
default DECnet account running out of some quota or other.
Check your NETSERVER.LOG files to see what was going on in
the receiving process.
- Fixing the problems would require revamping the MAIL-11 protocol
and all the code that speaks it (including mailers on
several PDP-11 operating systems).
- It is never likely to be "fixed" - in official terms, this has never
been a supported feature, so is not broken.
DEC gives away VAX MAIL, and also sells Email products.
The other Email products do a lot more - X.400-style
addressing, store-and-forward, etc. Which do you think is
likely to receive the development money?
Mailing to an account forwarded to a list, all of whose users are local to
the machine the list is on, will USUALLY work. (If any of the accounts
being forwarded to is ever removed, you'll have problems.) Anything else is
unlikely to make you happy.
There have been rumors reported on INFOVAX - about which I have no information
one way or the other - that the ability to forward to a list will be removed
from future versions of VMS. I suppose this would eliminate the confusion
that arises from an implementation that's kind of there, but not really. :-(
A workaround: Set up an account for the "mailing list", then write a command
file that runs in batch for that account, picks up new mail, and forwards it
to all mailing list members. The command file would re-que itself every
half hour, or whatever.
-- Jerry
-------Dreyer@HI-MULTICS.ARPA.UUCP (11/21/86)
If you are looking for what mailing lists are out there on the net then send mail to: Zellich@SRI-NIC He is keeping such a list for the arpa network admin people at the NIC. At least he was the last time I conversed via mail.