[ih] Email and address books

[Nigel Roberts]

Thanks for the perspective from the WRL side. And we (the Easynet 
community) were REALLY grateful for the service to and from the outside 
world.

People today just won't appreciate exactly what a benefit that was back 
then.

So thanks once again.



On 05/24/2012 11:21 AM, paul vixie wrote:
> On 5/24/2012 8:29 AM, Nigel Roberts wrote:
>> I worked for the ALL-IN-1 development team in the mid-80s.
>> ...
>> 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) ...
>>
>> 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
>
> that's:
>
> Nigel <roberts%untadh.DEC at decwrl.dec.com>
>
> /Wed, 11 Jan 89 03:02:40 PST
>
> /
>> 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.
>>
>> :-)
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> all of this got written up by fred avolio and i in the immortal classic,
> "Sendmail: Theory and Practice", amazingly still in print at:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Sendmail-Second-Edition-Theory-Practice/dp/155558229X
>
> 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).
>
> 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".
>
> :-)
>
> paul