Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!ihnp4!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: How to Implement Shared Mailboxes
Message-ID: <3347@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 88 03:33:03 GMT
References: <1658@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 47


> One of the things that I've wanted to implement in Elm for a while is
> what I'll call shared mailboxes.  The idea here is roughly that there
> are certain mailboxes that multiple people want to be able to interact
> with simultaneously.  
> 
> The current solution is simply to send the mail to 'n' users, with 
> each person ending up with their own identical mailbox.  As the 
> messages are answered, the reply is *also* sent to the group address, 
> which results in it being in the mailbox, and by this mechanism presumably 
> things work out okay, at the price of a typically huge mailbox.
> 
How about the simple-minded way of making the mailboxes directories
instead of files and using links instead of copies for each member of
the group. Then each user can delete or keep his copies without affecting
anyone else.  If you need to let each copy of Elm know what other running 
copies happen to be looking at, you could talk about inode numbers via IPC,
but assigning an arbitrary message number would be better if the shared files
might ever live on more than one filesystem.

I'm not all that interested in knowing about simultaneous access, though.
What I would like to see is the ability to access Notesfiles or news through
the Elm interface.  Notes is more efficient in terms of disk usage, but news
has so much more support software that it might be the best format even for
strictly local discussions.  Perhaps a little generalization of the concept
of "next message" and a choice of replying to the public message or via 
private mail would be all it takes.  If the news model is used, it would
be nice to add a "notes-like" index that would be updated only when the files
changed.

I also have a need to connect MSDOS users on a Starlan network with the
unix mail system.  It is possible to log in through the network and do
terminal emulation, but the users normally do not run unix.  It is also
possible to access the unix filesystem through DOS fileserver (netbios
emulation), or DOS and unix commands can be combined via pipes.  I would
prefer not to force the DOS folks to learn yet-another-editor just to
be able to reply to a mail message so I am leaning toward batch type
access where the whole mailbox is moved to the DOS disk, perhaps with
a commented reply header prepended.  They could then use their usual
editor to delete the original mail and replace it with their replies, then
send the whole thing back.  This sounds pretty clumsy, but so is trying to
fork an editor for each reply under DOS.  Has anyone done anything like this,
and if so, how?

   -Les

                                 ...ihnp4!chinet!les