From: David@fquest.FidoNet.Org (David)
Newsgroups: alt.missing-kids
Subject: Re:  E-mail
Date: 4 Dec 92 15:29:33 GMT

Oh boy!  One of my favorite topics!  Electronic mail!

(For those who haven't heard this story before ... I have been working
mundanely in the electronic mail field for well over 5 years now earning
my entire keep in this line of work.  It started as being a postmaster
for the cs/ma/stat departments in a smallish university in a state far
far away.  I started being one of the two maintainers of MMDF, one of the two
premier mail systems of that day and age.  That led to the job I have
at TWG.COM developing & designing an electronic mail system and user agent.
I've also been involved with the recent effort to develop a new version
of the Internet's electronic mail standard which allows us to ship any
sort of file in electronic mail w/o error.)

So, yes I am aware of the options at setting this up.  IMO it is about
one or two years too early to make a go at it.

> The real answer, IMHO, is that we need a network for the senior heralds,
> perhaps even one for just the principle heralds and laurel.

Well, yes.  But the expense... the expense.  (And the unequal access...)

> A machine
> some modems
> a few phone lines (3-4 minimum)
> someone to run the thing.

Yes.  But as Decion said it would be expensive for him to access the thing.
Many others have no access at all, or for that matter *desire*.

> I'm half tempted to put together a proposal and send it in to Laurel.
> If they are willing to try simple email, I can run a test with my home
> machine as the hub.  I already have a dedicated phone line and regular
> connections.  David could probably do the same with his sparcstation.

Don't think for a moment the thought hasn't been running through my mind!


First..  Kwellend suggested cobbling something together with UUCP and
a small PC/AT class system.  While, yes, it would do the job I'd see
that only as a temporary situation for "proof of concept".  The job here
is one which requires reliability.  You are talking about doing a portion
of the commentary (guess: 1/4th) through this and you certainly don't want
to lose any.  Fortunately the cost of a "high reliability" (or, decent
reliability anyway) system is dropping every month.  Sun now has a SPARC
*server* for US$5200 (with a 1 gig disk and 32 megs of memory even).

The previous paragraph is all talking about a `hub' system .. see a few
paragraphs down.

Where getting UUCP for the small systems out there comes in is for all
the individual commenters.  And, yes, UUCP implementations have been
available for all these small systems (even CP/M? I'm impressed!) for a
few years now.  The last time I looked (>3 years ago) the quality was
pretty poor, but even at `part time' rates 3 years means a lot of bugs
fixed.  This should cause very few people to consider upgrading their
computers.

In a UUCP based mail system the modems are connected *only* long enough
to transfer data and control files.  You are not logged in leisurely
reading your mail and learning the commands of some new system you find
yourself logged in on.  All your interaction is with programs on your
local host.  So, connect time is minimized to some extent.  Ought to
make Decion feel a *little* better.

The system should have a central computer to be a `hub'.  All e-mail
might go through it but it strictly doesn't have to.  The `hub' though
is the perfect place for mailing lists.  For instance, to send in your
commentary you might send it to "CoH-Commenters@davids.mmdf.com" and my
system would turn around and address it to the current list of
commenters.  Hmm.. It wouldn't be too hard to automagically print that
out for heralds *not* on E-Mail ...??

And with the Internet designed as it is many of the commenters could
call local (or otherwise nearby) sites which are attached to the
net and forward their mail on to here.  So many people wouldn't
have to call my system here in Los Altos (or wherever the hub would
end up being).

I don't know how much all this would cost.  For me to run it from
here would cost me no extra money and very little extra time.  This
system has been very reliable for 1.5 years and it already has a
domain name registered to it and is connected to a well connected site.


Now.. about transferring fancy text files through this stuff.

I mentioned having worked on a new format for Internet E-Mail which
allows it to carry any sort of file around.  The protocol has been
designed, accepted as a standard and has many implmentations available
right now.  It is called MIME (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions)
and is upward compatible from the mail format we are using right
this very second.  While it has "many implmentations available", it
is not ubiquitously available.  So you cannot be sure to find it
available *everywhere* right now.  Next year ...

It is able to send any sort of file around.  It encodes binary files
into text using an encoding which is extremely safer than UUENCODE.
The encoding is very simple, exactly as simple as UUENCODE in fact,
and decoding software can be made available very easily.  This will
allow y'all to ship WordPerfect or whatever files with fancy characters
and be sure that your correspondants can see the umlauts and thorns
in all their glory.


So most of the problems have solutions (though with unknown cost)
presented above.  I am 100% confident that either Kwellend or myself
could pull it off and we have worked together in the past (you don't
live with someone for almost 3 years without being able to get along
with 'em!).

The real problem is one of ubiquity.

E-Mail is not available *EVERYWHERE* and in many places short sighted
administrators put limits on its use.  This creates an unequal
situation where some commenters are more equal than others.  The ones
who have E-Mail access have full and quicker distribution, while the
ones who are not would have constant danger that someone on E-Mail
would `forget' to send their Snail-Mail commentary.  The idea I had
above of automagically printing & snail-mailing files for heralds not
on E-Mail helps a lot though.

Ubiquitous e-mail has been "2 years away" for some time now, just like
ISDN has been "2 years away" for over 10 years.  I'm not sure what it
will take to shorten that down to 2 months.  But things are looking up
since PacBell recently announced widely available ISDN service in this
area as an initial phase in building "data highways".  I dunno 'bout you
guys, but I have visions of a direct connection to the TCP/IP Internet
dancing in my head!  Get rid of this UUCP sh*t once and for all!


I meant this to be short and I'd do the long one next week ...  ohwell
y'get me started on e-mail and I can talk for hours.



        David le Casse'
        (feeling more like David Herron, Resident E-Mail hack, right now)
        Silver Chick PE


P.S.  On the other hand it appears I'll be taking over one of the external
commenters positions in this kingdom next year.  So anybody who wants to
exchange their commentary with me via E-Mail ... ;-)