cc:Mail

[Grant Taylor]

On 10/7/20 6:57 PM, Tomas By wrote:
> Well, both? According to the "about" window in the client on the 200LX, 
> it is indeed "cc:Mail mobile", but I believe I also need to set up a 
> "normal" post office. (The 200LX manual does not say anything specific 
> about versions.)

I'm betting that there's a nomenclature collision.  Specifically, it 
sounds like some versions of the mobile client use "cc:Mail Mobile" and 
possibly others use "cc:Mail Remote".  It also sounds like the central 
office also uses "cc:Mail Mobile" as what the client dials into.  So 
simply stating "cc:Mail Mobile" is ambiguous to which end of the 
connection is being discussed and what technology is used therein.

> Yes, it may have been 8.1 I looked at a while ago. At that time I had 
> the impression the SMTP gateway only handled outgoing mail, but that 
> does not really make sense, and apparently it handles both directions.

It may have been that there wasn't a solution to get email inbound to 
you.  That jives with your "SMTP gateway only handled outgoing mail" memory.

After all, I'm suggesting fetchmail to do the inbound to the SMTP server 
from the POP3 / IMAP provider.  ;-)

> Well, I think the bottom two are the same (i.e. delete "mobile" 
> and change "remote"->"mobile").

I don't think they are.

They may be the same software / product.  But they are serving two 
distinct functions.  The upper one is what allows road warrior clients 
to dial into, the "server" service if you will.  The lower one is the 
road warrior "client" which does the dialing.  Ergo, I don't think they 
are the same thing.  They are probably in different (logical if not 
physical) locations too.

Fetchmail -> cc:Mail SMTP -> Internet SMTP server
                    ^
                    |
                    V
               cc:Mail PO
                    ^
                    |
                    V
             cc:Mail Mobile
                    ^
                    :         Corporate Office LAN
-------------------:-----------------------------
                    :                 Road Warrior
                    V
             cc:Mail Remote

> I was able to connect the 200LX to a Post Office using null modem 
> with no "mobile" or "remote" add-on installed on the windows PC, 
> if I remember correctly.

What software were you running on the 200LX?

There are ways to extend the Corporate Office LAN over a modem connection.

There's a chance that various versions of cc:Mail include the client 
portion that connects to the corporate server.  (That would actually 
make a lot of sense.)

> I think "mobile" was a product for laptops, and the one on the 200LX 
> was a minimal version of that.

Hum.

My read is that cc:Mail Mobile is also the server side product that 
allows dialing in and exchanging email.

> Yes, probably. All I can say is that it did not seem so simple when 
> I looked at it some time ago.

The lack of fetchmail (or something like it) means that things get more 
complicated and you likely have to play email routing games, which are 
non-trivial.

> (I think my problem was that I did not consider Fetchmail. I was 
> looking for that functionality in the cc:Mail documentation.)

Remember, back in thee '90s, people weren't normally trying to do things 
like pull email from an ISP's server into a local server with things 
like fetchmail.  Instead, they would have their ISP's be an SMTP Relay 
for their domain and use normal SMTP routing to get email into their 
SMTP server.  The latter function is something that cc:Mail's Link to 
SMTP will quite happily do.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die