TSA@seivax.pnet ("Todd Aven") (11/11/86)
I have not used GMAIL, so I don't know how good or bad it is. As far as other mailers, I've tried the Software Tools MSG system and PMDF/VMS-822 (recently offered on info-vax). While STM was completely free, I found it quite difficult to set up to serve as a transparent mailer for the situation where the only network transport was BITNET. I loved the user interface (very UNIXy), but the mailer really required more effort than I wanted to put forth. Am I just brain-damaged? I just got PMDF last week, and wow! I'm finally on the net! This is a great package, cowboys and cowgirls. It's nice to get an inexpensive product ($50) with plenty of good documentation, and be able to get it running in just a couple of hours. The whole thing is written in Pascal, and although I don't have the compiler, I didn't need it at all! To get things running required editing the configuration file which lists nodes and editing the script file for Phonenet connections. Big deal. My big brother could have done it. There are one or two minor bugs, but I've already talked with the developers and they are very responsive. No major bugs at all. The only drawback I can see to using PMDF as a mailer on your system (it can easily replace the Wollongong TCP/IP mailer and the jNet Bitnet mailer) is that submission of mail creates one batch job per message. The developers seemed in their documentation to suggest that they were intentionally avoiding a daemon process, but I think that is exactly what is needed (they allow for using a daemon to poll, but not for submission). Are you listening, Ned and John? But heck, I don't have all that much mail going in or out, anyway. The bottom line? GMAIL apparently is free, but PMDF is as good as free, and extremely well put together. You don't have to compile anything. And the ability to network (in the sense of e-mail) VMS/VAXen with nothing more than asynchronous lines is a godsend (T: "My budget is unbelievably small." Chorus: "How small is it, Todd?"). Try it, you'll like it. Cheers, Todd Aven the Softwear Sweatshop