🚀 go-pugleaf

Am I missing something here?  Why is it that I seem to be the only person
who thinks that MIME based e-mail packages can take on the very profitable,
yet proprietary mass market e-mail packages like Microsoft Mail (aka Network
Courier), Lotus cc:Mail, Da Vinci E-Mail, etc?
  
The basic architecture that I would see working is as follows:

- MIME based user agent running on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.
- Uses POP3 over TCP/IP as transport between user agent and server.
- POP3 compliant servers for Unix, Novell NLM, Univel platforms.
- SMTP protocol used for server to server communications.

Nice features of this architecture:

- because TCP/IP is used as a transport for both client/server and server/server
  communications, you can use other off the shelf components for things like
  providing remote dial in support:  ie use SLIP/PPP communications servers
  for this task.
- again, since TCP/IP is used as the transport, you can take advantage of the
  standard TCP/IP APIs that exist on Windows (Windows Socket API) and 
  Macintosh (MacTCP).
- same user interface whether you run the user agent remotely over dialup or 
  locally from a LAN (assuming you use SLIP/PPP for dialup communications)
- interoperates seemlessly, without the need for gateways, to other SMTP
  based servers and MIME based user agents.
  
This a broad architecture and there are many details to be worked out, such
as user directories, directory synchronization, IP address assignment, etc.

My question to the Net is:  am I missing something obvious, or is there a
tremendous opportunity to make buckets of money constructing and selling 
such a system?
-- 

Phil Trubey                   | Internet: ptrubey@netcom.com
Systemhouse Inc.              | Voice:    415-327-8337
                              | Fax:      415-243-0471