🚀 go-pugleaf

with all the noise about Deliver I was reminded of
a successfull attempt of mine to extend the Xenix
mail system across dissimilar networks.  Micnet,
as distributed with Xenix, is only nominally useful
as it expects hard wired async comm ports as a
physical layer.  Microsoft, however, hacked the mailer
sufficiently to allow sending mail to anybody on
this happazard network without knowing their machine
name.  Just what I wanted except that I wanted to use
uucp, some bizare enet code, and anything else that
came up as a transport.

what I found (its nice to have friends who have
access to code :) is that the program mail.mn
in /usr/lib/mail is a backend to mail that packages
the mail up into a 'remote' command (Micnets remote
command execution program) and then execs remote.

I replaced mail.mn with a generic backend that read
a mail.mn.routes file which looked like this:

# mail routes
#
#       $m - target machine
#       $s - senders name
#       $t - name of temp file
#       $u - target users
#
othermach	-d      uremote - othermach /usr/lib/mail/execmail -f duanev $u
default		-       uux -r - "$m!/usr/lib/mail/execmail -f duanev ($u)"

So now the transport to any given machine could be
easily specified via this ascii file.  Note that the
Micnet interface is still intact (othermach is presumed
to be attached via the standard Micnet hardware (ha!)
and config files).  The Micnet configuration, although
messy, now includes non Micnet connections and volia -
a seamless mail network appears.

Enough babbling - if interested, give me a hollar -
extreme intrest will cause a comp.sources posting
although I'm not quite sure what group should get it...
-- 
--- Effectiveness is the measure of Truth:
----            ALL systems are arbitrary!
--- duane voth              duanev@mcc.com
--