rick@essex.ac.uk (Rick Blake) (04/25/89)
Perhaps some of you good people out there in netland can help me? The problem I have is to try to allow people to send/receive mail on IBM pcs and clones. We have a compact campus plumbed with Ethernet, and many of the academics or departments have bought pcs and hooked them on to the Ether. Now they are all clamouring to be able to receive mail on their pc. Only trouble is, I can't see a practical/secure way of doing it. Mail comes on to the campus and is redistributed from a uVAX running MMDF. This is no problem for the un*x-based machines, but won't work for the pcs. Does anyone know of any software that will either: 1) Allow mail to be distributed to an IBM PC and still retain a level of security or 2) operate in a nntpd/rrn manner, thus allowing users to read their mailbox from a central repository? Any suggestions will be gratefully received; please mail me rather than cluttering up the net. Rick Blake User Services Manager MAIL: rick@essex.ac.uk UUCP: ...mcvax!ukc!sx!rick
davidr@hplsla.HP.COM (David M. Reed) (04/27/89)
One of the main reasons we bought FTP Softwares' PC/TCP was for the SMTP mail programs. The package includes telnet, ftp, rexec, ping, lpr, rcp, rsh (remsh), tar, mail, and several other programs. The mail program is a reasonable implementation of mailx. The only real "gotcha" is that the typical PC is a single tasking system. In order to receive mail you have to run an SMTP server. If that program is not running, then mail will back up on any system trying to send the mail. So users have to remember to leave it running when there system is not doing anything else (e.g. at night), or let if run for a while to receive mail before they want to read it. The can send mail at any time, but if they are sending mail to another PC (which will probably NOT be running the server), we route all PC mail through one UN*X server. (From there the mail administrator can determine who has not been running the server frequently enough.) We have a sight license. FTP Software, Inc. P.O. Box 150 Kendall Square Branch Boston, MA 02142 617-246-0900 P.S. Technically, we did not use the "receive and read mail on the PC" approach very long before we determined there were too many problems (e.g. running out of hard disc space for incomming mail, the servers not being run frequently enough, people not wanting to have to remember to run the server program, etc.). So we changed our approach to set up one UN*X system as the PC server, where all PC users are provided a login and all mail is addressed to. Then, whenever they want to read their mail they simply telnet to the system. If they want to tranfer information from their mail to the PC, or from the PC to be mailed, they use 'tftp' within telnet. We set up some simple programs to make it easy for the file transfers, and also to easily print their mail on their local PC's printer, or send the PC files to the UN*X systems for printing on servers.