From: mjr@TIS.COM (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.apps
Subject: Re: Windows-Based UNIX Email Reader
Date: 5 Jan 93 16:04:18 GMT
Reply-To: mjr@TIS.COM
Organization: Trusted Information Systems, Inc.

>Can anyone recommend a Windows-based package that can get 
>the mail from the /usr/mail/spool file on Unix and allow 
>the mail to be read from the PC?

	There's a package I wrote called 'Umail' which does
some of what you want. The price is right, anyhow (free).
Umail is available for FTP from decuac.dec.com, in pub/dos
and this is the README:

mjr.
----

	This is the Umail2.0 distribution. It consists of two kits, one of
which is installed on the PC, the other of which is installed on the UNIX
host. Each is in a separate subdirectory with a README file which describes
how it is to be set up. The UNIX side is in source format, the PC side is
a binary-only distribution. Umail assumes you are running Windows and
works best if you have a mouse.

	Briefly, here's how Umail and its associated tools work:

	The goal of Umail is to provide a portable "detachable" mail reader.
When I was doing a lot of travelling on airplanes and had a laptop running
Windows, I thought it'd be nice if I could catch up on my mail on the plane,
reading, replying, and deleting it, then plug it in (somehow) to my home
machine and have it deliver the mail, delete the messages from my inbox,
refile stuff, etc. Umail does a form of "transaction" based on the message
ID of mail messages. So, if you delete a message on your PC, when you later
want to synchronize your mailbox, the tools included with Umail will handle
deleting messages with that message ID. In order to accomplish this, Umail
writes a file of commands for a transaction processor that runs on your
UNIX machine (though I suppose porting this to VMS or something else is
reasonably straightforward).

	Umail mail transaction files contain the following types of
operations:
	delete message-ID

	folder foldername message-ID

	sendmail
	.
	.	a bunch of text with '.' as the first character of each
	.	line
	.
	liamdnes

	The tools on the server side process the transaction file and
hand it off to subprograms that are responsible for deleteing, foldering,
or delivering mail. Each of these subprograms is invoked with its
standard input from a main transaction sorter program "pcmail_in". The
behaviour of these components is described in a bit more detail in
README in the "unix-side" directory.

	Umail2.0 has support on the unix side for BSD-style mailboxes
or MH-style folders. Since the processing mechanism is very generic, it
shouldn't be hard to interface to any other mailing system desired.
For moving mail up and down between the PC and the server, there are
several options. The simplest is to just use PC-NFS or something like
that, and make the mail-putter and mail-getter jobs on the PC perform
proper file conversion and then copy the file to a private area. A
second approach, if using a PC with an IP stack, is to FTP the mail
file from /usr/spool/mail/USERNAME manually, or to use a version of
'rcp' if such is available. For serial line transfers, kermit is an
effective tool.

	Umail is also designed to work with the "Mail Mover" software,
which is a set of kermit scripts and a kermit script writer that will
handle dialing and downloading mail for the user automatically. "Mail
Mover" is available for FTP along with Umail.

	Umail is totally unsupported, but it's also free. You are
prohibited from selling it, except for "media cost" if the media cost
is under $1. The author will accept bug reports, and will probably
generate fixes, but has no plans to add significant new functionality,
bells, or whistles. Umail was written in Visual BASIC (a wonderful
tool) and consists of approximately 300 lines of code. Source code
to Umail will not be made available.

Marcus J. Ranum,
Nov 24, 1992