info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (02/16/85)
From: engvax!KVC@cit-vax
The main change you'll see in VMS MAIL in V4 is that you
don't need that stupid patch to make it leave case alone
in quotes. Also, there is a new hook to allow you to attach
your own mail delivery mechanism to MAIL. You can, for example,
send mail to an address of the form:
arpa%"user@host"
Then, if you have a shareable image in SYS$LIBRARY called
ARPA_MAILSHR.EXE or pointed to by a logical name of the
form MAIL$PROTOCOL_ARPA, MAIL will activate your image on
the fly and map it into it's address space and call your
MAIL$PROTOCOL entry point. There is a fairly simple calling
convention MAIL uses to give the message to your handler.
I'm in the middle of writing a handler for our UUCP system.
I will put it on the DECUS tape and maybe archive is somewhere
on a friendly ARPAnet site when it's done. I have the outgoing
portion working, and am currently writing the code that allows
UUCP to hand a message to MAIL for local (or remote DECnet)
delivery.
/Kevin Carosso engvax!kvc @ CIT-VAX.ARPA
Hughes Aircraft Co.
ps. No, the mail hook is not documented anywhere (as far as
I know). There are no useful comments on the fiche
either.