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- Path: sparky!uunet!ogicse!uwm.edu!wupost!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!rice!dboyes
- From: dboyes@is.rice.edu (David E Boyes)
- Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
- Subject: Re: All-in-1 mail, POPMail
- Message-ID: <Bxn8sw.B8I@rice.edu>
- Date: 13 Nov 92 07:29:20 GMT
- Article-I.D.: rice.Bxn8sw.B8I
- References: <1992Nov11.154720.28785@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca> <BxKqA8.ADA@rice.edu> <1992Nov12.140452.48@dallas.sil.org>
- Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
- Organization: Rice University
- Lines: 74
-
- In article <1992Nov12.140452.48@dallas.sil.org> mcdonald@dallas.sil.org writes:
- > [...] It doesn't consume
- >much more resources than VMSMail. It is a little harder to set up, but
- >once its up it is very clean.
-
- It is less resource intensive than interactive sessions on the
- same hardware, but the physical hardware (VAXes) is comparatively
- expensive and is proprietary. Using POP or IMAP and the clients
- he described in his initial message, he could go out tomorrow
- and replace his mail server with a cluster of machines running
- Amoeba or an IBM mainframe and his users would probably never
- notice the difference if the host name and IP address of the
- server remained the same.
-
- I'm aware that DEC is working on a portable VMS, but that's not
- an option right now -- you're still stuck with buying VAXes to
- run the mail servers, and the price/performance/maintenance cost for Vaxes
- compared to small workstations or large PCs running Unix is just
- not very good.
-
- >> b) you are willing to accept the limitations and syntactical
- >> complexity involved in getting the Mail-11 transport to cope
- >> with non-DEC network software and protocols
- >
- >Sorry, but neither Allin1 IOS or MAILWORKS uses Mail-11. They are both
- >based on Message Router (which is now provided under the DECNET end-node
- >license). A gateway is needed to get to the rest of the world, however, of
- >which there are several. The best is from Innosoft.
-
- Message Router is nothing more than a Mail-11 external transport
- manager with a simplified external interface to the foreign
- protocols. The X.400, SMTP, and PSI transports that work with Message
- Router are certainly better than their earlier couterparts that
- dealt directly with the Mail-11 internal interface, but they
- still are difficult to configure correctly and produce headers
- that are unpleasant to parse on non-DEC, non-MR systems.
-
- My basic paradigm for mail systems says that *anything* related
- to protocol or address conversion should be as invisible as
- possible to the end user. Neither the traditional All-in-1
- (allin1 IOS, as you call it) or Mailworks make sending mail to
- widely varying addresses -- SMTP, UUCP bang paths, Novell MHS
- gateways,etc. -- simple or syntactically consistent. Of course,
- part of that is due to the differing address structures
- themselves, but I don't find the method that either version of
- Allin1 uses intuitive or particularly easy to use or explain to
- end users.
-
- >> c) can afford the licensing cost for significant numbers of
- >> microcomputer clients.
- >If you are already running Pathworks, then there is no additional licensing
- >fee. Mailworks for DOS comes with the PATHworks for DOS client license,
- >and MAilworks for MAC comes with the Pathworks for MAC client license.
-
- Has DEC added Pathworks to the CSLG CD-ROMs? Last I checked
- (beginning of this year), Pathworks wasn't available via CSLG.
- Pathworks is also rather touchy about network hardware, doesn't
- deal well with routed networks instead of bridged networks, and
- DEC tends to be slow to support new and lower cost networking
- hardware for microcomputers.
-
- The original poster already has a functioning distributed mail
- system with a reasonable interface, direct SMTP support, support
- for a wide range of network hardware and software via packet
- drivers and the PD community, and it doesn't cost him much more
- than the support costs of getting the documentation edited for
- his site and packaging the clients for his users. I can't see
- where Allin1 or Pathworks buys him any real advantages.
-
-
- >Dan McDonald * UUCP ...utacfd!dalsil!mcdonald
- --
- David Boyes
- dboyes@rice.edu
-