On Sep 4, 2006, at 12:38 PM, Fran Hensler wrote:
Yes, Shimon, RiceMail was free from Rice University. I might be able
to dig up a copy from a very old archive tape.
But RiceMail was written before there was MIME email. It can't
process HTML or attachments.
If people are really interested in modern mailers for VM:
Sine Nomine Associates did a product a couple years ago called
"SMTPPLUS" which is a smallish prepackaged Linux system running Exim
4, amavis, Spam Assassin, and Clam AV (for a busy site, the spam and
virus scanning is *not* something you want to do on your zSeries
box), plus some custom code to integrate the VM spool with the Linux
mail spool and to make connections from the Linux host appear to be
going directly from the VM host. Exim gives you all the features
you'd expect in a modern mailer, including TLS support, DNS-based
blacklisting, and an immense amount of configurability.
It can accept files punched to it as well as delivered via IP; it can
deliver via a punch to a particular user or to a mailer machine, and
there are hooks to do, say, LDAP-based lookups to associate an e-mail
address with a VM userid. It includes a netdata converter, so it can
handle ASCII or EBCDIC RFC-2822 mail, Netdata encoded or not. You
can also deliver *some* mail to the spool, and other mail to, say,
local Maildirs for pickup via POP3 or IMAP. It's very flexible. It
even uses CMSFS and a little boot-time magic to enable you to edit
the configuration files for the mail and scanning systems from CMS if
you prefer, rather than having to do it in Linux.
It's unmaintained at this point and the underlying Linux distribution
needs a lot of updating, because we never got a whole lot of interest
from the community and eventually decided we were not going to see a
return on the R&D, and it needs quite a bit of machine to be suitable
for a high-volume site (especially if spam and virus scanning are
enabled). However, if people *would* be interested in it and would
pay for the product and support, then I could try to make a business
case to my management that it should be revived.
Alternatively, given the information above, you could probably
implement something pretty close to that on your own (as the primary
developer: the tricky part is the spool integration; the Netdata
converter isn't *hard* but getting it really compatible gets tricky),
or, as a third option, hire us (or, indeed, some other consulting
firm) to install and configure such a solution for you as a time-and-
materials contract, if you don't have the relevant Linux expertise in-
house.
Also, note that SMTPPLUS is a mail *transfer* agent, not a mail
*user* agent: actually reading your mail on VM requires some CMS tool
like MAILBOOK (although PEEK or XEDIT also work, if mail is delivered
to your spool--however, you'll need something in CMS to, say, unpack
MIME messages, and that something isn't contained in SMTPPLUS).
Likewise, sending mail from VM: basically, you create an RFC-822-
compliant message *somehow*, and punch it to the SMTPPLUS virtual
machine, but creating that message in the first place is the
responsibility of the MUA.
Adam
