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On 5/24/2012 8:29 AM, Nigel Roberts wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4FBDF17C.5020306@channelisles.net" type="cite">I
worked for the ALL-IN-1 development team in the mid-80s.
<br>
...<br>
And sending email to and from the wider Internet was actually
easier than Paul remembers.
<br>
...<br>
There were various gateways between Message Router (the email
backend of ALL-IN-1) ...<br>
<br>
But what I uses was am ALL-IN-1 feature that sent VAXmail from
inside ALL-IN-1 (my memory is failing as to exactly how, but I
remember hacking something in the DCL code that actually
implemented it. I seem to recall that it may have been prefixing
the address with '_'
<br>
<br>
So to email the Internet from ALL-IN-1 was as "simple" as sending
it to
<br>
<br>
_RHEA::DECWRL::<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:user@host.tld">"user@host.tld"</a>
<br>
<br>
You can see what the return address would have looked like to the
Internet user at
<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.4.html#subj1.1">http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.4.html#subj1.1</a>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
that's:<br>
<br>
<address>Nigel <roberts%untadh.DEC@decwrl.dec.com></address>
<i>Wed, 11 Jan 89 03:02:40 PST<br>
<br>
</i>
<blockquote cite="mid:4FBDF17C.5020306@channelisles.net" type="cite">
This shows a reply address that would translated to an internal
Easynet address in the form UNTADH::ROBERTS which typically would
be automatically forwarded into Message Router/ALL-IN-1 by the
ALL-IN-1 user having done a $MAIL SET FORWARD.
<br>
<br>
:-)<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
so, from 1988 to 1993 i ran DECWRL:: (as the rest of the company
knew our DECnet Phase IV node name) and i was using a public-domain
version of the mail11 gateway code (originally written by keith
moore, then at UTK) which i'd hacked to do "block mode" since the
decnet-savvy people in the company were really pissy about "line
mode" which apparently did one "line" per round trip (no
pipelining). i'd by this time thrown away the Ultrix version of
sendmail, restarted from berkeley sendmail, which i ended up
publishing as "King James Sendmail" because eric was at that time
still at britton-lee software, and sendmail was in its walkabout
phase (before Sendmail, Inc. was started). KJS included lennart
lovstrand's most wonderous "IDA Sendmail" hacks, which allowed for
arbitrary "db" lookups from within rulesets, so that i could do UUCP
routing based on a pathalias database rather than having "rmail" do
it.<br>
<br>
i also ended up throwing away all the m4-based sendmail.cf
generation logic from both berkeley and ultrix, and starting from my
own private .cf file.<br>
<br>
all of this got written up by fred avolio and i in the immortal
classic, "Sendmail: Theory and Practice", amazingly still in print
at:<br>
<br>
http://www.amazon.com/Sendmail-Second-Edition-Theory-Practice/dp/155558229X<br>
<br>
in 1992 or so i convinced my various bosses (mostly this was brian
reid, since i think dave crocker was gone by then) to let me buy a
VAX 5400 running vax/vms so that i could run a proper "DIGITAL
ALL-IN-1" mail gateway instead of relying on the underbar hack
you're describing here. that was node name WRLMTS:: and you knew us
as @WRL. this effort failed miserably because i wasn't as able to
hack the software on VMS as i had been on Ultrix (which was really
just a sad old cut of BSD).<br>
<br>
so, you're welcome, DECWRL was happy as heck to carry all your
e-mail to and from the internet. but from talking to ALL-IN-1
customers outside the company, who had to use DEC's own products to
do this kind of thing, they couldn't make it work any better than i
could. thus my comment, "weeping and wailing".<br>
<br>
:-)<br>
<br>
paul<br>
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