postel@VENERA.ISI.EDU (04/01/88)
Tony: Please note that you can get RFCs by return electronic mail. The following information has been included in recent RFC announcements. The NIC provides an automatic mail service for those sites which cannot use FTP. Address the request to SERVICE@SRI-NIC.ARPA and in the subject field of the message indicate the RFC number, as in "Subject: RFC nnnn". --jon.
haverty@CCV.BBN.COM (04/01/88)
Hi Jon, The electronic mail channel is nice, but note that Tony's Mac doesn't have an electronic mail server either. Even if it did, given the nature of personal computers (not always powered up, may be doing other things, etc.) I'm not sure it would help if it did. Perhaps if there was a pervasive use of the PC-Mail (is that the right name) service that would meet the needs. Like Tony, I have a MAC on my desk, and happen to have a PC-clone as well, on the Internet. We also tend to occasionally carry a laptop on trips. There is more computing power and memory on my desk than there was in an entire computation center building not too many years ago. I do 99% of my work on those machines, and the frequency with which I interact with the network to check mail, etc., is on a consistent downward trend. What we're reacting to I think is the situation where it's still necessary to establish a virtual terminal link to a machine on the net, and login, type/send small packets, etc., like I'm doing now. I've been using Lotus Express, Desktop Express, and Compuserve Navigator, which are all Personal-machine-oriented programs to utilize the services of public networks (Compuserve and MCIMail). It's an entirely different style of network usage, where the fact that the network is involved becomes almost invisible. Anybody have ideas (or software...) that would make such usage exist on the Internet? Jack
CERF@A.ISI.EDU (04/02/88)
Jack, I obtained a program from the SRI-NIC called PC SAM which operates in some ways like Desktop Express. It doesn't run in the background like Lotus Express, but it does pull and push mail on its own like Desktop Express does. I'm with you on different mode of interaction than remote to a time-shared host through a packet net. Vint
Crispin@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Mark Crispin) (04/02/88)
Jack -
At SUMEX-AIM, we have a distributed mailsystem called MM-D, which
is supported by a client on Xerox Lisp machines (a TI Lisp machine client
is almost finished, and work has started on a MAC client) and servers on
a DEC-20 and Unix. It's gotten to the point that several of us have more
or less abandoned logging into the timesharing system to read our mail;
we do it from our workstation.
MM-D uses the IMAP2 protocol, which compares to POP2 in much the way
a BMW compares to a tricycle. The modality of IMAP2 is more interactive
than POP2, but there's nothing in IMAP2 that requires that; it can be
used in an offline way such as PC Mail.
-- Mark --
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