jbvb@FTP.COM (James B. Van Bokkelen) (09/21/90)
Over the last few years, the issue of how to do distributed mail support within a site full of single-user workstations and PCs has attracted a good deal of attention from protocol designers, but little from commercial vendors. Protocol systems addressing this include POP2/SMTP, PCMAIL (RFC 1056), POP3/SMTP and POP3/IMAP. Functionality and details differ, but each combination manages to give the user mail access without requiring either a single central machine big enough for everyone to log in on, or the installation and maintenance nightmare of making each host act as a full mail forwarder. At the moment, there are probably almost a dozen supported commercial clients for POP2, POP3 and PCMAIL on various platforms including DOS, OS/2 and MACs. However, I did a survey earlier this summer and only turned up one new supported server (POP2) to add to the two commercial POP2 servers I already knew of. This seems somewhat lame, given the availability of mature freeware servers for all the protocols, and the great utility distributed mail represents (I'm on a commuter train using a laptop to edit this. It will get sent once I get to work. This is how I handle almost all of my mail). Why am I saying this? Not as a commercial, or a boast; Sun and IBM offered DOS clients to go with their servers long before we will (October), the first three OS/2 TCP/IPs to ship all included clients, several MAC clients exist. Instead, I think distributed mail is an idea whose time has come, and I would be pleased to see it as widespread as X in a couple of years. This won't happen unless supported servers are widely available. So, the message: Distributed mail is here, it works. Users and managers who want it supported should bend their vendors' ears. Vendors should look around and evaluate the market that's developing, the number of clients that are available. POP2 is obsolescent, I personally prefer PCMAIL, others prefer POP3 with IMAP, but in the long run timely action seems more important to me than which protocol system eventually wins. Read the RFCs, peruse the freeware and get off the dime... James B. VanBokkelen 26 Princess St., Wakefield, MA 01880 FTP Software Inc. voice: (617) 246-0900 fax: (617) 246-0901