mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) (05/15/89)
If MailApp is not your thing, there is an alternative under way.
For the past few years I've been developing distributed electronic
mail using a client/repository model similar to that used in Pcmail,
Andrew, and POP2. The underlying protocol is IMAP2 (Interactive Mail
Access Protocol 2), described in RFC-1064. IMAP is to POP much as a
BMW is to a tricycle; the current incarnation (IMAP2) is RFC-888 mail
oriented. Future IMAP protocols will be ISO and multi-media.
There is a complete IMAP2 server for BSD Unix (as well as one for
the DEC-20, in case anyone still cares). There are production IMAP2
clients for the Xerox Lisp machine, TI Explorer, and BSD Unix. The
BSD Unix client has at its core the "portable C-client" library which
runs on just about any machine imaginable with a C compiler; a simple
"test" client main program has been run under BSD Unix, DEC-20,
Macintosh, and MS-DOS. Stanford is developing a native Macintosh
client, and I am porting the BSD Unix client to MS-DOS as a background
task.
The news of interest to this group is that my primary task in the
past few months has been the development of a native NeXT client
called MailManager. I have a working version of MailManager under 0.8
(modulo 1 unimplemented switch) and am now upgrading it to 0.9.
MailManager is less glitzy than MailApp, but it's far more
functional. There's no voice mail in MailManager (yet), but I feel
that it's more important to get a highly functional text mail system
working first. There are hooks for voice and other multi-media
capability in both the IMAP protocol and in the software, so this can
be added in the future.
If you don't receive mail on your NeXT then sendmail isn't used
at all (the portable C client has its own SMTP client), so you don't
have to worry about trying to torture your /etc/sendmail/sendmail.cf
(why did they move it?) into working. You can even run mmdf if you
like. MailManager sends outgoing mail to any of its list of "mail
delivery servers" that it can reach via SMTP, and the mail delivery
server then takes care of distributing the message to all its
recipients. So you have one sendmail.cf to debug instead of zillions
on every workstation. :-)
MailManager is not ready for release yet (I'm changing it every
half hour or so!) but I am using it now as my primary mail reader so
it's real, not vaporware. I hope to have a beta version of
MailManager available for the community soon.
Mark Crispin / 6158 Lariat Loop NE / Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2020
mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU / MRC@WSMR-SIMTEL20.Army.Mil / (206) 842-2385
450cc Rebel pilot -- a step up from 250cc's!!!
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