This is mail-on-NeXTs in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 14-May-1989 20:22:10 From: Unknown Subject: mail on NeXT's 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!!! kisha no kisha ga kisha de kisha-shita...tabesaserarenakerebanaranakattarashii >From: glc@frame.UUCP (Greg Cockroft)
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.