cc:Mail

[Chris Zach]

Oh this brings back memories. Back in the 1980's I worked with 
Westinghouse/IRD and we used CC:Mail. When we partnered with Macro 
systems we tied the two together using a CC:Mail gateway package that 
ran over dialup modems.

Moving into the 90's, the IEEE Computer Society was on CC:Mail in 1994 
when I got there. We tied it to the Internet using a CC:Mail gateway on 
DOS *and* a CC:Mail to SMTP gateway application. Both had to be running 
and yes, the CC:Mail SMTP gateway had a lot of cruft pile up on it. It 
also locked up a LOT.

In order to make the thing useful we ran it on OS/2 pre warp. That made 
it a lot more stable and I was able to script a process to restart the 
window when it crashed. Allowed me to sleep at night. But the main fail 
in CC:Mail was that the mail database could only be 2gb in size and it 
corrupted a LOT.

1995 or so we put in Lotus Notes mail and migrated the CC:Mail database 
to it. Infinitely more reliable, ran on OS/2 3.0 very well as a server, 
and as a side project I coded Notes Script into what became probably the 
first end user identity system on the internet (E-Accounts) which 
allowed us to roll out E-Aliases, member renewal by internet using our 
home-made credit card system, online registrations for Supercomputing/95 
and the CS Digital Library in 1996 (I built that too).

All because I was (a) Bored and (b) Lazy. Amazing times, but Lotus Notes 
was damn near indestructible. Never lost an email message.

I should really write that history down sometime and somewhere. In the 
early 1990's IEEE lost their mind and for a few brief years (up to 2000) 
we at the Computer Society were free to innovate and really built some 
amazing things. Then the IEEE got their stuff together and smushed it....

Ah well.
CZ

On 10/7/2020 11:22 AM, Gavin Scott via cctalk wrote:
> These may all be dead short-circuited neurons, but IIRC there was a
> cc:Mail Gateway or Internet Gateway special product you needed to buy
> that would run on a dedicated PC box (under DOS?) and would talk in
> turn to your cc:Mail post office server and the 'net to exchange email
> messages in and out. It had the semi-annoying habit of retaining
> plaintext copies of all incoming or outgoing messages (one or the
> other, I forget which). There was also some non-trivial configuration
> setup required on both the Gateway and cc:Mail servers to explain all
> this to cc:Mail. I think there was some sort of route name or gateway
> name specified with email addresses, possibly with a comma after the
> internet address, but like I said those brain cells are almost gone.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 9:04 AM Tomas By via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> And one more thing,
>>
>> Am wondering about the possibility of setting up an interface between
>> modern Unix email and the embedded client for cc:Mail on the HP 200LX.
>>
>> Various versions of cc:Mail are available from archive.org and
>> vetusware.com, but the missing link seems to be the "client" type
>> connection from the cc:Mail post office to the internet, i.e. for the
>> PO machine to connect periodically and collect mail, rather than just
>> acting as a server.
>>
>> Have not been able to find much technical information about cc:Mail. I
>> did see a Lotus development kit for sale somwhere but seems to have
>> lost the link.
>>
>> Does anybody here know anything about this? Are there any books or
>> technical documents on cc:Mail available anywhere?
>>
>> /Tomas