cc:Mail

[Gavin Scott]

P.S. As far as I can recall I never connected my 200LX up to our
cc:Mail even though I carried a 95/100/200 around with me pretty much
all the time in those days.

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 3:13 PM Gavin Scott <gavin at learn.bio> wrote:
>
> 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