Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.UUCP From: amanda@intercon.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: The Future is NOW Summary: Well, it's a-comin', anyway... Message-ID: <11-May-89.012453@192.41.214.2> Date: 11 May 89 05:16:46 GMT References: <10576@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> Sender: news@intercon.UUCP Reply-To: amanda@intercon.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Sterling, VA Lines: 31 In article <10576@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, wetter@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Pierce T. Wetter) writes: > > I have read many postings from various people who would like to send and > receive mail, and read news on their mac. [talks about Phil KarnUs stuff] > ... however, by > merging the KA9Q sources with the NCSA Telnet sources, this could be fixed. > And I wouldn't have to use these lame mainframes to send mail anymore. Yeesh. Unfortunately, the programming interfaces for Phil's & NCSA Telnet don't much resemble each other. There are some commercial products in the works, as well. We showed a preview of ours at MacWorld Expo/DC, and in fact I am posting this very message from my Mac II. We expect to start shipping non-beta copies in, say, mid-June (i.e., about the time of Summer Usenix...pure coincidence, I assure you :-)). Mail in particular is not as easy as it seems, however. Sending is relatively easy, but receiving gets a little thorny, especially with KIP/KSTAR style dynamic IP address assignment, the fact the Macs tend to be turned off in at night, and so on. A mailbox server is a good approach, but there are so many standards to choose from :-) (POP2, PCMAIL, IMAP2, FTP (hey, it could be done), etc.), and all of them so far are more-or-less copylefted, which poses a problem for commercial distribution. If last year was "The Year Of The Network," will this year be"The Year Of Real Macintosh EMail?" [1/2 :-)]? -- Amanda Walker