[ih] Internet mail in the 80's

[Eberhard W Lisse]

I very vaguely remember something like this from BITNET/EARN, but I got in touch early with a local IT consultancy which had a limited news feed. They also compiled and installed kermit on my request, but I sort of rocked up there twice a week to read Usenet News :-)-O

They also, eventually, allowed me uuPC access which for a while was how my mother (Germany) and I (Namibia) exchanged Baby news from 1990/1991 until they supported PPP.

They wrote a very cool MicroElm which allowed the use of MicroEmacs. I then wrote 3000 line .BAT to tie this all together with a little selection screen (there was some curses library around) and virtually on the day it all worked, Windows came out. But I seem to remember for Windows 3 there was a little Mail program which could use uuPC so she used that while I was an early Linux adopter.

el


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Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse \ / Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (retired)
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On May 22, 2026 at 08:48 +0200, Greg Skinner via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>, wrote:

> On May 21, 2026, at 11:19 PM, Nigel Roberts via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>

> > Not connected to 3com in any way, but I have a vague recollection of a site somewhere on the net that you could post to Usenet using email, somehow.
> >
> > I'm sure others have better memories than me.
> >
> >
>
> I recall many Usenet sites supported this feature, but don’t remember which ones off the top of my head. With sendmail, one would put an entry into the ‘aliases’ file such as:
>
> news-alias: |"/usr/bin/inews -h"
>
> Sending an email message to news-alias at the_system_offering_the_feature (or whatever convention was supported) in an acceptable format (such as RFC 850 <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc850/>) would pipe the message to inews with the -h option, which posted the message on the system offering the feature.
>
> --gregbo
>
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