From: dboyes@is.rice.edu (David E Boyes)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: All-in-1 mail, POPMail
Date: 13 Nov 92 07:29:20 GMT
Article-I.D.: rice.Bxn8sw.B8I
Organization: Rice University

In article <1992Nov12.140452.48@dallas.sil.org> mcdonald@dallas.sil.org writes:
> [...] It doesn't consume
>much more resources than VMSMail.  It is a little harder to set up, but
>once its up it is very clean.

It is less resource intensive than interactive sessions on the
same hardware, but the physical hardware (VAXes) is comparatively
expensive and is proprietary. Using POP or IMAP and the clients
he described in his initial message, he could go out tomorrow
and replace his mail server with a cluster of machines running
Amoeba or an IBM mainframe and his users would probably never
notice the difference if the host name and IP address of the
server remained the same.

I'm aware that DEC is working on a portable VMS, but that's not
an option right now -- you're still stuck with buying VAXes to
run the mail servers, and the price/performance/maintenance cost for Vaxes
compared to small workstations or large PCs running Unix is just
not very good.

>>   b) you are willing to accept the limitations and syntactical
>>      complexity involved in getting the Mail-11 transport to cope
>>      with non-DEC network software and protocols
>
>Sorry, but neither Allin1 IOS or MAILWORKS uses Mail-11.  They are both
>based on Message Router (which is now provided under the DECNET end-node
>license).  A gateway is needed to get to the rest of the world, however, of
>which there are several.  The best is from Innosoft.

Message Router is nothing more than a Mail-11 external transport
manager with a simplified external interface to the foreign
protocols. The X.400, SMTP, and PSI transports that work with Message
Router are certainly better than their earlier couterparts that
dealt directly with the Mail-11 internal interface, but they
still are difficult to configure correctly and produce headers
that are unpleasant to parse on non-DEC, non-MR systems. 

My basic paradigm for mail systems says that *anything* related
to protocol or address conversion should be as invisible as
possible to the end user. Neither the traditional All-in-1
(allin1 IOS, as you call it) or Mailworks make sending mail to
widely varying addresses -- SMTP, UUCP bang paths, Novell MHS
gateways,etc. -- simple or syntactically consistent. Of course,
part of that is due to the differing address structures
themselves, but I don't find the method that either version of
Allin1 uses intuitive or particularly easy to use or explain to
end users.

>>   c) can afford the licensing cost for significant numbers of
>>      microcomputer clients.
>If you are already running Pathworks, then there is no additional licensing
>fee.  Mailworks for DOS comes with the PATHworks for DOS client license,
>and MAilworks for MAC comes with the Pathworks for MAC client license.

Has DEC added Pathworks to the CSLG CD-ROMs? Last I checked
(beginning of this year), Pathworks wasn't available via CSLG.
Pathworks is also rather touchy about network hardware, doesn't
deal well with routed networks instead of bridged networks, and
DEC tends to be slow to support new and lower cost networking
hardware for microcomputers. 

The original poster already has a functioning distributed mail
system with a reasonable interface, direct SMTP support, support
for a wide range of network hardware and software via packet
drivers and the PD community, and it doesn't cost him much more
than the support costs of getting the documentation edited for
his site and packaging the clients for his users. I can't see
where Allin1 or Pathworks buys him any real advantages.


>Dan McDonald                    * UUCP      ...utacfd!dalsil!mcdonald
-- 
David Boyes
dboyes@rice.edu