[ih] Early email systems

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Jaap Akkerhuis wrote in <201807180844.w6I8i2gD048095 at bela.nlnetlabs.nl>:
 | Dave Crocker writes:
 |>> UNIX background processes: what I am looking for is an understanding 
 |>> about how they became invoked in email systems: were they perhaps part 
 |>> of POP of IMAP protocols? Or introduced in some other way when an email 
 |>> goes astray or to an unknown address?
 |>
 |> Pop was much later.  IMAP was much, /much/ later.
 |>
 |> I think you are looking for asynchronous return error messages, and I 
 |> don't remember when those first started showing up. Messages were being 
 |> queued for asynchronous transfer -- and therefore asynchronous error 
 |> handling -- by the mid-/late-70s.
 |
 |
 |I get the impression Ian wants to know how one got "You have mail" on
 |the terminal in UNIX. That was/is actually done by the shell. From the
 |manual:
 |
 |     MAIL          The name of a mail file, that will be checked for the
 |                   arrival of new mail.  Overridden by MAILPATH.
 |
 |Berkeley UNIX gave you "biff".

And BSD Mail 1.3 from 3BSD as of 1980-03-? possibly said "Thou
hast new mail." when the program run was used to read the system
mailbox.  I.e., the box may have been modified while we were
reading it, and some care was taken to merge the open copy and the
data on disk, then.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)