General PC e-mail questions
Marc Unangst
that boot from a floppy and get all their post-boot files from the
network; i.e., no local hard drive) that I've been put in charge of
getting e-mail working on. That was no problem; right now we're using
Pegasus Mail and most of the users like it, or can at least stand it.
However, now the plot thickens: there's also an SCO Unix machine on
the network, and this SCO Unix machine talks to some other outside
sites via UUCP. We'd like to set things up so that the people on the
Netware workstations can send and receive mail to/from UUCP and
Internet sites. I've tried to get Charon running, but have been
having some rather serious problems, so I think it's time to start
looking at some other options. All the users are set up with packet
drivers for their network card; we're using the BYU packet driver IPX
to access the Netware server, and CUTCP to access the Unix machine.
So far as I can tell, there are basically three ways of doing Unix
e-mail from the PC end of things: 1) Have a gateway between the PC
e-mail software and Unix which handles the mail, a la Charon; 2) Use
something like POP or IMAP that lets the PC user access their Unix
mailbox from their DOS machine; and 3) Have the users log onto the
Unix box via telnet or whatever and run Elm or their favorite MUA.
The problem with (1) is that we haven't gotten it to work(*). The
problems with (3) are that it's rather ugly from the user's point of
view (no touchy-feely GUI or pseudo-GUI, they have to log into the
Unix box every time they want to check their mail, etc.) and that it
doesn't support automatic mail notification. Our users have gotten
quite attached to the automatic notification that Pegasus Mail
provides via the Netware message line, and don't want to have to check
their e-mail every hour or so. So, the option I've been looking at is
(2), getting POP or IMAP or something like that running.
(*) - Our major problem right now with Charon is that it can be coaxed
into some sort of endless loop where it keeps bouncing a message over
and over and over again. The way we create it is to have one of our
users send mail from Pegasus to a user out on the Internet, who then
replies to that message. When the reply hits the Charon box, it
bounces between Charon and our SCO Unix box until it hits 19 or 20
hops, then bounces. Except Charon doesn't delete the message from the
work queue after it bounces it, and so it *keeps bouncing*. We
managed to fill up about 25MB of space on the Unix machine over this
past weekend with spooled bounces, both in the outbound SMTP queue and
the outbound UUCP queue. This is *unacceptable*; I'd rather have
separate Unix and Pegasus mailboxes with no gateway in-between than
something like this.
I've tried POP; I managed to get the popd server running on the SCO
Unix box, and even managed to get a PC POP client running. The only
problem is that POP doesn't seem to have a way to check for mail, or
some sort of "biff"-like program that would run on Novell to announce
new mail. So, I decided to try IMAP today; I downloaded the server
from ftphost.cac.washington.edu, but unfortunately it seems to be
fairly well-tied to a 4.3BSD-like architecture, and SCO Unix is
SysVr3.2. I also couldn't seem to find an IMAP client for DOS,
and although clients for the Mac and the NeXT were available all over
the place, neither one helps me out.
So, I suppose my final questions are: Is there an IMAP server that
compiles under SysVr3.2? Is there an IMAP client for DOS? Is there a
biff-like program for IMAP that does new mail notification via the
Netware message line? Or is there perhaps a better way of doing what
we want to do that I haven't though of yet?
--
Marc Unangst | Real men don't make backups. Real men never
m...@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us | accidentally delete files that they're going
<backbone>!sharkey!mudos!mju| to need later.
Mark Crispin
which is included in the distribution. We don't have any SCO systems in-house
although we would be happy to accept an SCO port that follows our conventions
(basically, no changes to the main modules, all OS-dependent stuff is in the
os_???.h, os_???.c, and makefile.??? files).
One of the sites we communicate with did an SCO port in an older version. I
could send you a copy of their port if you feel adventureous enough to try a
merge.
The DOS client is coming -- review some of the earlier messages on this
newsgroup. Basically, we have ported Pine to DOS, but we want to get it to
handle memory a bit better before we release it.