cc:Mail

CC:Mail could run in two ways. For the longest time it was just a shared file on a network server that all the clients pointed to. Well, a directory, and this is part of the reason it got corrupted as hell. Rebuilding CC:Mail usually required shutting down the PO (writing a file that told the clients to go away) and rebuilding. That's why the gateway systems worked, they just talked to the same folder and stuck files in the input and output directories. The SMTP tool required a unix box to send mail (it was too stupid to really do it by itself) and to CC:Mail it looked like a "foreign" post office. I think at the end they had a true client-server model, but by that time Notes was a much better solution.

The other fun email system at the time was WordPerfect Office.

That one ran as an NLM and once again it was file based from the client but corrupted a lot less. And once again SMTP was a foreign PO, and in fact Crystelcom was founded as a way to use the Wordperfect Async Gateway to hook up to a modem to the client's server that would call my house every hour and deliver internet mail to my post office which also had a copy of Wordperfect plus a SMTP gateway. And pick up their mail, at 14.4kbps with compression it was pretty quick. A pair of Sun 386i's (beaker and bunsen) then served as DNS servers for the client's domain as well as smtp servers for outbound and inbound mail. I did the same thing for Microsoft mail, but it sucked more and to be honest that was why I was loathe to support CC:Mail.

For $100 a month it was a steal for a lot of small companies and nonprofits to communicate on the Internet. And for me it was simple as dirt, I just needed a pair of phone lines to handle the incoming calls and mail would queue up. Outbound internet was a Trailblazer modem to my ISP of the time running ppp from one of the 386i's.

If two clients called at the same time one would get a busy and would call back later (5m). If the mail server crashed mail would just queue and be delivered when I rebooted it. It was literally a "open mailbox, hello check" and paid for a good chunk of the down payment on the house. Oddly enough the most valuable thing was that companies registered their domains (through me) years before the great rush. This is why a lot of small non-profits have domain names that reflect their initials as opposed to crap. I never charged a transfer fee when they finally got their T1 lines, that would have been evil. Ultimately closed it down when the web got popular. I thought of getting big by going into massive debt and hooking in T1's to the customers but the company was profitable, simple, it served its purpose and I was ok with letting it go. Probably a wise decision, my ISP actually made a profit :-) Ah those were the days.