[ih] Email and address books

[Nigel Roberts]

I worked for the ALL-IN-1 development team in the mid-80s.

DEC (sorry.. DIGITAL) were /very/ particular about spelling and 
capitalisation. I think I still have a poster somewhere showing all the 
'incorrect' versions, the 'correct' one, and the slogan "ALL-IN-1 --- 
it's number one!"

And sending email to and from the wider Internet was actually easier 
than Paul remembers.

There were various gateways between Message Router (the email backend of 
ALL-IN-1) and the outside one. The one I worked on was MRX-400 which did 
exactly what you might imagine from the name.

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 '_'

So to email the Internet from ALL-IN-1 was as "simple" as sending it to

_RHEA::DECWRL::"user at host.tld"

You can see what the return address would have looked like to the 
Internet user at

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.4.html#subj1.1

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.


:-)


Nigel (nigel at roberts.gg)

> weeping and wailing in that era to get it to gateway anything to/from
> the internet.