duanev@kauai.ACA.MCC.COM (Duane Voth) (03/04/89)
with all the noise about Deliver I was reminded of a successfull attempt of mine to extend the Xenix mail system across dissimilar networks. Micnet, as distributed with Xenix, is only nominally useful as it expects hard wired async comm ports as a physical layer. Microsoft, however, hacked the mailer sufficiently to allow sending mail to anybody on this happazard network without knowing their machine name. Just what I wanted except that I wanted to use uucp, some bizare enet code, and anything else that came up as a transport. what I found (its nice to have friends who have access to code :) is that the program mail.mn in /usr/lib/mail is a backend to mail that packages the mail up into a 'remote' command (Micnets remote command execution program) and then execs remote. I replaced mail.mn with a generic backend that read a mail.mn.routes file which looked like this: # mail routes # # $m - target machine # $s - senders name # $t - name of temp file # $u - target users # othermach -d uremote - othermach /usr/lib/mail/execmail -f duanev $u default - uux -r - "$m!/usr/lib/mail/execmail -f duanev ($u)" So now the transport to any given machine could be easily specified via this ascii file. Note that the Micnet interface is still intact (othermach is presumed to be attached via the standard Micnet hardware (ha!) and config files). The Micnet configuration, although messy, now includes non Micnet connections and volia - a seamless mail network appears. Enough babbling - if interested, give me a hollar - extreme intrest will cause a comp.sources posting although I'm not quite sure what group should get it... -- --- Effectiveness is the measure of Truth: ---- ALL systems are arbitrary! --- duane voth duanev@mcc.com --