edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen) (07/12/88)
The Elm Mail System - A Brief Introduction and Status Last Update: July 12th, 1988 by Eric Christensen ============================================================================== I have had numerous requests for general information and status regarding the Elm mail system. In an admittedly half-hearted attempt to answer many of the commonly asked questions in one shot, I will begin posting this document on a fairly regular basis to comp.mail.elm. This document consists of a short status update of current Elm development, and a slightly hacked copy of Dave Taylor's overview document that is supplied with the Elm sources. ============================================================================= Elm - The state of the mailer ----------------------------- The Elm mailer has now been officially released to the public trust by it's original author, Dave Taylor. All future Elm development and support will be done by it's users. In an effort to prevent the project from getting out of hand, a coordinator will always be entrusted with the duties of maintaining the master sources, accepting bug reports, and building the Elm releases which will appear in comp.sources.unix. In general, if you have any questions, comments or suggestion regarding the Elm mail system, they should be directed to the USENET group comp.mail.elm, or to the current coordinator. Elm Coodinator: Eric Christensen - edc@altnet.ALTOS.COM (uunet!altnet!edc) Current Official Release: 1.5 (Note: There are several 'un-official' releases of Elm which are available from various USENET archives or from individuals who may, or may not be associated with the Elm project. 1.7 is in wide distribution, and several flavors of 2.0 beta and gamma sources are also floating about. If you wish to use one of these "renegade" releases, so be it. But don't expect too much. For the most part they are not well tested, and certainly contain their share of bugs and non-portabilities. If you plan on doing any development work with Elm, it is suggested that you get the current official release from a comp.sources.unix archive. Please do NOT badger Dave Taylor or the Elm Coordinator to send you Elm sources. They are too large to mail. In the near future a group of anonymous uucp and ftp sites will make the Elm sources available to anyone.) Release Under Development: 2.0 (Will be called 2.1 to avoid confusion) State of Development: Sources will be released to the test group 7/12/88. Estimated Release Date: approximately August 15th, 1988 ============================================================================== [ The remainder of this document is a slightly hacked version ] [ of Dave Taylor's Overview document, which is supplied with ] [ the Elm source distribution. ] An Overview of the Elm Mail System ---------------------------------- Introduction This file discusses the functionality of the Elm mail system and explains some of the motivation behind the various features. 1. What is Elm? Currently on Unix, there seems to be a preponderence of line-oriented software. This is most unfortunate as most of the software on Unix tends to be pretty darn hard to use! I believe that there is more than a slight correlation between the two, and, since I was myself having problems using "mailx" with high-volume mail, I created a new mail system. In the lingo of the mail guru, Elm is a "User Agent" system, it's designed to run with "sendmail" or "/bin/rmail" (according to what's on your system) and is a full replacement of programs like "/bin/mail" and "mailx". The system is more than just a single program, however, and includes programs like "from" to list a 'table of contents' of your mail, "printmail" to quickly paginate mail files (to allow 'clean' printouts), and "autoreply", a systemwide daemon that can autoanswer mail for people while they're on vacation without having multiple copies spawned on the system. 2. What's New about Elm? The most significant difference between Elm and earlier mail systems is that Elm is screen-oriented. Upon further use, however, users will find that Elm is also quite a bit easier to use, and quite a bit more "intelligent" about sending mail and so on. For example, say you're on "usenet" and receive a message from someone on the ARPANET. The sender also "cc'd" another person on ARPA. With Elm you can simply G)roup reply and it will build the correct return addresses. There are lots of subtleties like that in the program, most of which you'll probably find when you need them. 3. What systems does it work on? Elm was originally written on HP-UX, HP's proprietary version of Bell system V, with a little BSD thrown in. Since then, it has been ported to Bell, Berkeley, Sun, UTS and the Pyramid and should run on all these systems without any modifications (if there turn out to be modifications, please notify the author as soon as possible). The current release of Elm does not run under Xenix or on 80286 based systems, though several people have made it work. Full Xenix and 286 support is planned for the 2.1 release. 4. Does it obey existing mail standards? Yes! That's another of the basic reasons the program was originally written! To ensure that the date field, the "From:" line and so on were all added in the correct format. The program is 100% correct according to the RFC-822 electronic mail header protocol guide. 5. What were the main motivating factors? The first two I've already mentioned, but here's a (somewhat partial) list; - To have a mail system that exploited the CRT instead of assuming I'm on a teletype. - To have a mailer that was 100% correct when dealing with network mail (ie RFC-822). - To create a system that needed no documentation for the casual user, but was still powerful enough and sophisticated enough for a mail expert. - To write a "significant" piece of software as a learning experience (I admit it!) - To find out how reasonable it is to try to modify a program to meet the expectations of the users, rather than vice-versa. - To basically correct some of the dumb things that the current mailers do, like letting you send mail to addresses that it could trivially figure out are going to result in 'dead.letter' - To tie in intimately with the pathalias program output, and allow users to specify machine!user or user@machine and have the COMPUTER do the work of figuring out addresses... 6. Is it reliable? The mailer, in various incarnations, has logged literally thousands upon thousands of hours without any problems that aren't now corrected. As new problems arise they're dealt with in as rapid a manner as possible... 7. Disclaimers The author and coordinator of this program will deny all liability for any damages, either real or imagined, due to the execution of this program or anything related to either the software or the system. Furthermore, the entire system and all source within, including the presentation screens and commands, are legally copyrighted by the author, and while they can be used, and abused, for public domain systems, it will be in violation of the law if used in systems or programs sold for profit. By installing the mailer or even extracting it from the network, you are agreeing to the above disclaimer. -- Dave Taylor ============================================================================== -- +-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ | Eric D. Christensen | Email: edc@altnet.altos.com (uunet!altnet!edc) | | Altos Computer Systems +--------------------------------------------------+ | 399 West Trimble Road | Note: There are no spelling errors in this | | San Jose, Ca. 95131 | message.... I just can't type! | +-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ | These views aren't Altos' - They're mine, all mine, and you can't have them| +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+