On 10/7/20 5:50 PM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
CC:Mail could run in two ways. For the longest time it was just a shared
file on a network server that all the clients pointed to. Well, a
directory, and this is part of the reason it got corrupted as hell.
Rebuilding CC:Mail usually required shutting down the PO (writing a file
that told the clients to go away) and rebuilding. That's why the gateway
systems worked, they just talked to the same folder and stuck files in
the input and output directories. The SMTP tool required a unix box to
send mail (it was too stupid to really do it by itself) and to CC:Mail
it looked like a "foreign" post office.
I think at the end they had a true client-server model, but by that time
Notes was a much better solution.
See my reply at 6:13 for comments about cc:Guardian / IMAP / POP3.
The other fun email system at the time was WordPerfect Office.
Was that (the precursor to) GroupWise? Or something independent?
That one ran as an NLM and once again it was file based from the
client but corrupted a lot less. And once again SMTP was a foreign PO,
and in fact Crystelcom was founded as a way to use the Wordperfect
Async Gateway to hook up to a modem to the client's server that would
call my house every hour and deliver internet mail to my post office
which also had a copy of Wordperfect plus a SMTP gateway. And pick
up their mail, at 14.4kbps with compression it was pretty quick. A
pair of Sun 386i's (beaker and bunsen) then served as DNS servers for
the client's domain as well as smtp servers for outbound and inbound
mail. I did the same thing for Microsoft mail, but it sucked more
and to be honest that was why I was loathe to support CC:Mail.
Why were you loathe to support cc:Mail? Did Microsoft Mail and / or the
WordPerfect Office thing produce more income?
For $100 a month it was a steal for a lot of small companies and
nonprofits to communicate on the Internet. And for me it was simple as
dirt, I just needed a pair of phone lines to handle the incoming calls
and mail would queue up. Outbound internet was a Trailblazer modem to my
ISP of the time running ppp from one of the 386i's.
For the time, and the service you were providing, I'd say that was a
good price.
If two clients called at the same time one would get a busy and would
call back later (5m). If the mail server crashed mail would just queue
and be delivered when I rebooted it. It was literally a "open mailbox,
hello check" and paid for a good chunk of the down payment on the house.
Oddly enough the most valuable thing was that companies registered their
domains (through me) years before the great rush. This is why a lot of
small non-profits have domain names that reflect their initials as
opposed to crap. I never charged a transfer fee when they finally got
their T1 lines, that would have been evil.
Ultimately closed it down when the web got popular. I thought of getting
big by going into massive debt and hooking in T1's to the customers but
the company was profitable, simple, it served its purpose and I was ok
with letting it go. Probably a wise decision, my ISP actually made a
profit :-)
Ah those were the days.
Interesting story. Thank you for sharing.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
