root@ucbvax.UUCP (10/08/83)
>From GEOFF5@SRI-CSL Sat Oct 8 01:08:23 1983
You've already seen my flames about how MAIL should enable an
out-of-band AST for ^H during message input and output a nasty
message, so I won't repeat that.
We too are faced with the problem of communicating with non-DEC-
supported networks and the need for store-and-forward mail. We
don't want to run two mail systems since it's too confusing for
the user community (we flushed the Sventek msg because of this).
The problem was then to integrate the various kinds of MAIL into
the existing DEC environment. Incoming mail is obviously no
biggie. Outgoing requires some tricks.
We don't play games with DECnet objects, rather we take advantage
of a little "feature"--comments are preserved in To: lines. In
order to send a message to my favorite mailing list, I send to
MAILER!Info-VAX@SRI-CSL. MAIL ignores the ! and everything
following, but doesn't strip it. A batch job runs as MAILER,
reads its mail, does something appropriate, and resubmits itself
to run twenty minutes later. One problem with this scheme is
that you can't put MAILER!... in a distribution list. Another
problem is that MAIL is a bit overzealous about upcasing the To:
line. This is fixed at our site by patching MAIL to stop
upcasing as soon as it hits an ! (sorry, Kevin). The patch for
V3.3 is available via FTP from JPL-VLSI (user ANONYMOUS, any
password) as DIST:FIXMAIL.COM. The patch for V3.0-V3.2 is in
DIST:FIXMAIL.V32.
-=EPS=-
------daemon@ucbvax.UUCP (10/11/83)
From GEOFF5@SRI-CSL Tue Oct 11 04:58:34 1983 You've already seen my flames about how MAIL should enable an out-of-band AST for ^H during message input and output a nasty message, so I won't repeat that. We too are faced with the problem of communicating with non-DEC- supported networks and the need for store-and-forward mail. We don't want to run two mail systems since it's too confusing for the user community (we flushed the Sventek msg because of this). The problem was then to integrate the various kinds of MAIL into the existing DEC environment. Incoming mail is obviously no biggie. Outgoing requires some tricks. We don't play games with DECnet objects, rather we take advantage of a little "feature"--comments are preserved in To: lines. In order to send a message to my favorite mailing list, I send to MAILER!Info-VAX@SRI-CSL. MAIL ignores the ! and everything following, but doesn't strip it. A batch job runs as MAILER, reads its mail, does something appropriate, and resubmits itself to run twenty minutes later. One problem with this scheme is that you can't put MAILER!... in a distribution list. Another problem is that MAIL is a bit overzealous about upcasing the To: line. This is fixed at our site by patching MAIL to stop upcasing as soon as it hits an ! (sorry, Kevin). The patch for V3.3 is available via FTP from JPL-VLSI (user ANONYMOUS, any password) as DIST:FIXMAIL.COM. The patch for V3.0-V3.2 is in DIST:FIXMAIL.V32. -=EPS=- ------
daemon@ucbvax.UUCP (10/13/83)
>From GEOFF5@SRI-CSL Thu Oct 13 02:00:56 1983
We use the MAILMAN!GJC@MIT-MC hack also for Chaosnet Mail at MIT,
and some sites have hacked up CHAOSNET => DECNET => CHAOSNET => ARPNET
forwarding. The MAILMAN daemon implements mailing lists and forwarding.
On the other hand, the next release of NIL/EMACS has RMAIL, and sends
mail by writing a queue file to the SYS$MAIL directory. Probably
anyone with a reasonable programmable EMACS will want to do such a
thing.
-gjc