From: Bob Dew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Does anyone use a kerberized POP implementation with AMS that has a
distributed means for notifying users of new mail arrival? (AMS uses
the ATK "console" program to monitor home-area mail delivery -- a
valuable user function that would be lost in a POP implementation of
messages). Somebody mentioned using zephyr datagrams for mail
notification, but the learning curve for installing zephyr on an
enterprise scale is also fairly steep.
Yes, we have such a system set up here at MIT, but it's not in
anything you could call `wide use' (or `medium use'. In fact, `narrow
use' is too generous - maybe `infinitessimal use'? I only know of 2
users currently, although I know it's been as high as 5 in the past
:-). It was setup by a person I used to work for (Bill Cattey,
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, who I don't *think will mind having his name appear
here. :-). It uses a modified version of emacs's movemail program
called `getmail' to get the mail from a (hesiod specified) kpop
server. Mail notifiaction is done via zephyr for everyone here, so
that's not a problem (for us). When I was still working for him (on
ATK stuff) I tried (not very long, admittedly) to get it to work for
me, but, like all ATK code, the `if USER == yandros' code prevented it
from working correctly. When we were trying to get it set up, Bill
told me that it ``hadn't been pleasant'' trying to seperate the AFS
mail delievery stuff from the rest of the code, but that was a couple
Andrew releases ago, so maybe it's improved? Overall, I thought it
was, like most ATK stuff I've used/worked on sort of pretty, not
overly fast, and sort of all right for some people, where `some
people' didn't include me. On the other hand, Bill, who got a lot
more mail than I did at the time, used it religiously, even unto using
vui and cui, which I usually see described something like ``that's a
protocol debugging tool, not a user client''. To each his own.
...but on to things relevant to info-afs: I don't think I've ever seen
anyone say that delivering mail via AFS was a good idea, and I know
that I've never seen anyone describe using AFS for `bboards' (we use
normal nntp clients and a system called `discuss' here) as anything
nicer than a good (over)stress-test for AFS. In a networked,
distributed system, kerberized POP clients are `the best thing going',
(IMHO) especially if you have some kind of decent notification system.
There are POP clients for almost every networked system I know about;
same holds for mime. MIT itself is pushing kpop clients for Macs and
Windows out the door as we speak (windows client is still beta this
week, I think. ;-), and I'm sure there are others out there (I know of
at least one, Eudora, offhand). On the U*NIX side, there are more
clients than you'd ever care to try, including MH, one in Emacs, and a
UNIX `mail'-style client.
Just another opinion..
chad
(who just switched from Emacs RMAIL to MH to help a friend debug
`exmh', a tk MH client. Three platforms, 30 minutes, 5 coredumps.
Wheee!!! :-)
