> On Jul 8, 2019, at 11:27 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
> ...
> On 7/6/19 12:57 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>> There's the MAIL-11 protocol (end to end, no MTAs) and the DECmail protocol
>> which may be some OSI-like thing, I'm not sure anymore.
>
> I guess I don't know enough about MAIL-11 to understand why you say
> end-to-end / no MTA.
No mail servers. You address mail to node::user and it contacts the mail
protocol listener at that node, which drops the message into the mailbox of
that user on that system.
> Was DECmail the OSI X.400 email implementation that DEC produced (I think) in
> the '90s?
Yes, in ALL-IN-ONE and the like. An interesting point is that it was not
really accepted as the internal mail tool (except by some corporate overhead
departments); engineering persisted in using MAIL-11 based email on the
internal network.
>> For real strangeness there is the PLATO mail protocol, which involves
>> writing the mail into files, which are then extracted from PLATO into the OS
>> file system by a periodic batch job, then sent to another system via file
>> transfer (FTP or a predecessor), then pushed into the PLATO file system,
>> then picked up by a mail agent at that end. Ugh.
>
> $ReadingList++
You're unlikely to find documentation for this, unfortunately. It's part of
the "linked systems" capability of PLATO, a loosely connected collection of
systems which could exchange email, notes (as in Lotus Notes, which goes back
to a very popular PLATO tool) and, in a very limited way, files. It used very
strange custom network hardware originally, and eventually moved to TCP/IP
under CDCnet.
paul
