Automatic E-Mail

[Bill Stewart]

[This isn't quite on topic, though you could stretch it to
deal with remailers.  Can the winsock remailer do this?]

At 10:50 PM 9/18/95 GMT, Rick.Sciorra at hudson.lm.com wrote:
>Does anyone know of an E-Mail package that will automatically connect
>to the Internet and retreive mail at specific intervals?

Sigh.  Folks have gotten too used to PC-market email systems,
which are generally braindamaged by having been around operating
systems where you can't just run a listner program that waits
for somebody to call you when they want to send you mail,
which of course fits in very well with letting ISPs avoid
having to make outgoing phone calls instead of just receiving,
plus the market reluctance of many of them to forward mail for you
to competing mail services and the client/server-orientation
that makes peer-to-peer services harder to implement.

Unix systems did this job just fine on PDP11/70s, which could
support a dozen or two users on a machine with about the
horsepower of a PC/AT.  And Henry Spencer could do that on a /44 :-)

Just about anything that does UUCP can be set to do that,
if you've got an ISP who doesn't charge you lots extra for
using UUCP.  Most high-end terminal emulation packages
have scripting languages that let you call up and do stuff,
which you should be able to call from timer programs;
you can probably even find a free Kermit version that will
do it.

I use Eudora Light with Trumpet to call Netcom's newbie-friendly
Netcruiser service; when I hit the menu item for send or retrieve
mail, it pops through all the layers and dials, and hangs up when it's done.
If Commercial Eudora can't already do that automagically, it should - 
ask Qualcomm to add it to the next version...  Alternatively, Winsock
programming isn't really all that hard, and POP3 is a pretty simple
protocol, so you could roll your own.
#---
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
#---