Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!uflorida!novavax!weiner
From: weiner@novavax.UUCP (Bob Weiner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Elm and other mailers for Apollos
Message-ID: <1274@novavax.UUCP>
Date: 18 May 89 22:27:42 GMT
References: <43290411.f81c@gtephx.UUCP>
Organization: Nova University, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 57
In-reply-to: barriost@gtephx.UUCP's message of 11 May 89 16:17:16 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.5 of Tue Sep 15 1987 on novavax (berkeley-unix)

>  In article <43290411.f81c@gtephx.UUCP> barriost@gtephx.UUCP (Tim Barrios) writes:
>
>   Here's the questions I have for other Apollo Sys 5 users:
>
>   Is there another mail system that is better than mailx for Apollo?
>
>   I've heard about 'smail'.  Is this available for Apollo?  What's
>   different about it v.s. mailx and Elm?
>
>   What do other Apollo users use to send/receive network mail?

We run a small ring of SR10.1 BSD UNIX DN4500s with modem connections to
other local hosts and to USENET.

To answer his questions it is important to distinguish between mail
delivery agents, such as BSD's Sendmail (the standard delivery agent for
all e-mail users under SR10), and mail program interfaces which abound
on UNIX and Apollo systems.  Some mail systems include both delivery
agents and user interfaces for reading and sending mail.

We use Sendmail as the delivery agent.  Unfortunately, Apollo's default
sendmail configuration file under SR10.1 does not properly resolve UUCP
'!' addresses.  There is a file under /domain_examples/sendmail (I
believe) call uucpproto.cf which looks like it handles this address
style but has not as yet worked for us.  Apollo should juice up the
default config file since there is no reason user's should have to
install this facility.

For a mail interface, we currently use GNU Emacs Rmail/mail since all of our
users use Emacs, rather than vi, to edit.  This gives them all of their
editor capabilities while reading and composing mail.  They can also
scroll through messages, delete messages, or randomly jump among
messages by clicking with one mouse button on an message header summary
line.  (GNU Emacs also offers an interface to the RAND mh mail handling
system distributed with AT&T's SysV.3.)

The Emacs interface expands basic mail address aliases.  In general,
Sendmail resolves all other address routing functions such as domain
name parsing.

Sendmail does not work with the USENET UUCP address map tables to find
appropriate UUCP routes for mail given a user and hostname combination.
This is the major purpose of the USENET project's 'smail' program; it
finds the best route that it can.  Hence, you probably want to configure
both of these programs on your system.

Unfortunately, Apollo currently does not distribute either smail or GNU
Emacs, though they could if they cared enough to support better
interactive environments and communication interfaces.  (HP probably
will distribute at least GNU code sometime in the future.)

You can get 'smail' from the UUNET source archives.

GNU Emacs comes from the Free Software Foundation, Cambridge, MA.
-- 
Bob Weiner, Motorola, Inc.,   USENET:  ...!gatech!uflorida!novavax!weiner
(407) 738-2087