cc:Mail

[Gavin Scott]

My recollection of the cc:Mail SMTP Gateway (that now sounds like the
right name to me) was that it was definitely bidirectional with
respect to SMTP/internet traffic. There were differences in that
inbound and outbound processing were rather different internally IIRC,
but that was pretty much transparent to the user. My recollection of
cc:Mail itself was that it was indeed a full server that clients
interacted with over a network connection. I *think* we ran it on
Netware with IPX/SPX as the client network transport in those days
(but again my memory could be faulty), and eventually got the SMTP
Gateway to get internet gateway connectivity and it ran on a minimal
PC system as a dedicated server. I seem to recall waiting a year or
more for the SMTP Gateway to finally become available. It seemed like
a rather half-assed solution compared to the Lotus Notes gateway etc.
which I think may have run as native Netware NLMs rather than needing
the kludgy PC gateway. This would all have been in like 1990-95-ish
give-or-take I think.

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 2:57 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/7/20 1:46 PM, Tomas By wrote:
> > Well, theoretically, you could have another program that emulates
> > the PO server side.
>
> I think that we have different understandings of what the Post Office is
> in older email systems.
>
> To me, the Post Office, is a collection of files that live in a
> directory structure.  Said file / directory structure is then directly
> accessed by the email client.  As in the email client reads from and
> writes to files, meaning that it does not talk to a program / daemon /
> service across the network.  It's just that this collection of files &
> directories lived on a common network drive.
>
> > It does not need to anything other than get the mails and talk to
> > the client
>
> But, based on my understanding, the cc:Mail client doesn't talk to a
> server.  It reads / writes files directly.  Hence the need to have
> something else, e.g. the gateway, communicate between the P.O. and the
> rest of the world.
>
> I don't see how you can avoid the P.O.'s file / directory structure.
>
> Maybe I'm wrong.
>
> > (over PC serial port).
>
> Hum.  That make make things more entertaining.
>
> Is the serial port for communications between the cc:Mail client and the
> cc:Mail P.O.?  Or is the serial port how you will need <what ever> to
> interface with the rest of the world?
>
> > My understanding is that the SMTP gateway is out from PO only.
>
> I don't know.  The MS-Mail SMTP gateway that I messed with was both
> inbound from the world and outbound to the world.  But the cc:Mail
> gateway could easily have been different.  Of course, SMTP is not the
> same thing as pulling from POP3 or IMAP.  But, fortunately fetchmail (et
> al.) can act as the gateway between POP3/IMAP and SMTP to talk to
> another gateway between SMTP and cc:Mail P.O.
>
> Moving parts (read: things that can go wrong), there are a lot of them.  ;-)
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die