nishri@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu (Alex Nishri) (10/26/88)
I haven't seen much on what others are doing about e-mail over Appletalk. I am interested in hearing what others are doing, particularly in supporting e-mail gateways to Internet, Bitnet, etc. For our part, we were frustrated last January that there was no vendor supplied solution that met our needs. So we started experimenting by writing a HyperCard stack which implemented an e-mail package. Using the Apple supplied serial port XCMD, the package worked under the covers by connecting to a Unix system and using the POP & SMTP protocols to access and send mail. The idea was to eventually switch to using the Apple NBP and ATP Appletalk XCMDS, and have a POP & SMTP over Appletalk server. However, three things stopped our effort. First of all, although HyperCard was an excellent prototyping tool, the lack of such things as multiwindows limited the user interface we could present. Secondly, we discovered that since XCMDs are reloaded from disk every time they are invoked, performance was restricted for the kind of I/O we wanted to do to the server. And lastly, when QuickMail became available for beta-testing we realized that it had the features we had been unsuccessful in bugging Intermail/Microsoft Mail or Inbox in providing. Using the QuickMail bridge feature and adding about half a page of PASCAL to a QuickMail supplied program, we found it easy to have QuickMail drop mail destined for other e-mail networks into a folder, and have it pick up mail from another folder. Using CAP and the Kinetics box these folders are made part of the Unix file system. (We have the Gator box and intend to also try using its AFP/NFS gateway feature as an alternative.) A simple daemon, constituting only a few hours work to put together, runs on Unix to handle the folders. A related effort, which we don't have working yet, is to have an SMTP server on the same Mac as the QuickMail Post Office. Both would run concurrently, using MultiFinder. Instead of using CAP or the Gator AFP<->NFS to have the mail transferred to Unix, the SMTP server running on the Mac would communicate through the Kinetics or Gator box to the Unix (or other system) SMTP server. I realize other people have been doing similiar things. I would be interested in hearing experiences. If anyone is interested, we will be prepared to share our code with anyone interested when it is fully working. Alex Nishri University of Toronto Computing Services nishri@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca