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From: acuff@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Richard Acuff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ti.explorer
Subject: Re: Starting an SMTP server on the microexplorer
Message-ID: <2861019382-4430509@KSL-Mac-62>
Date: 30 Aug 90 15:36:22 GMT
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I advise against using any personal workstation as a mail "server".  Their
inherent unreliability and typically poorly tuned networking software tends
to make mail a headache.  We believe this strongly enough to have invented a
mail access protocol and produced servers and clients for it.  The idea is to
have a few well tuned transport/server agents that know how to move mail
around (via SMTP, BITNET, uucp, fax modems, or carrier pigeon, ...) as well
as how to store it in some fashion well suited to the server machine.  Then
each machine you might want to read mail on has a client that knows how to
talk to the server to do operations like "Give me the body of message 22" or
"Which messages have 'acuff' in the From: field?", but conspicuously do not
know how the mail is actually stored on the server.

The revised protocol (crufty beast that it is...) is described in a recent
RFC by Mark Crispin (sorry, I can't recall the number) and was in an earlier
RFC as well.  We currently have Unix (native format and MM format) and
Tops-20 servers.  Mark has a NeXT client and I think his lab is working on a
PC client.  We have clients for Explorer/mX, Mac, Unix/tty and Xerox
D-machine and are working on an X11-based client.

I think the server, and perhaps the Mac client are available via anonymous
FTP to SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU in the "imap" directory.  If there is interest
we can make the Explorer client available sooner rather than later.
Documentation is scarce for it.

	-- Rich