It seems shortly after summarizing people were asking about ISA. I did
not include it at first because it is not available.
So here it is for all of you who asked.
p.s. Thanks again to all who replied.
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Robert J Wolf, Sun System Admin. DCIEM, CFB Toronto
rwolf@dciem.dnd.ca PO Box 2000 1133 Sheppard Avenue West
uunet!csri.toronto.edu!dciem!rwolf North York (Toronto), Ont., Canada M3M 3B9
Internet: 192.16.207.3 Phone: (416)635-2073 FAX: (416)635-2104
"Capitalism with environmental ethics will benefit the entire world."
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ISA is in the process of developing a NEW mailer for processing
electronic mail on networks. For lack of anything better, it is
presently called "imua" the "intelligent mail user agent". If you can
think of a better name, we would be interested in hearing from you!
Imua is has been designed and implemented to be as independent as
possible from operating system, display, and network protocols. We have
achieved this by building driver libraries for the OS and displays, and
using Mark Crispin's c-client drivers for MAP (Mail Access Protocol)
support.
Using this strategy, we are planning an initial version, to be released
mid January 1992 that will support:
OS - Unix, DOS
Displays - X11 (R4, R5, Openlook, Motif), MS Windows v3
Protocols - IMAP, POP, BSD message store via the c-client
The DOS version of the c-client will support all of the major DOS TCP/IP
stack implementations. The preferred stack (first to be developed) will
be Beame & Whiteside BWTCP.
Subsequent versions (not scheduled yet) will support
OS - OS/2, MS Windows/NT, MacOS, VMS
Displays - Presentation Manager, Mac, curses
Protocols - X.419?
It is our full intention to make this run on as many platforms, with as
many different transports (TCP/IP, OSI) as possible. Also, to ensure
that the full functionality of the MUA can be realized, we are including
in the package, distributions of mail transport agents (MTA'S) or
additions to existing MTA's, that we know to work on the different OS's.
This will include support for new message stores, DOS, OS/2, and Mac
MTA's.
With imua we plan to provide many interesting new features, such as:
- new mail notification.
- multiple simultaneous folder access and management (drag and drop
messages or blocks of messages between folders).
- personal address book lookup and management.
- personal configuration files.
- support for centralized fax delivery
- support for multi-part messages:
- messages can be constructed that include voice, image,
binary application data, and binary files.
- the different parts of the messsage can be extracted
and displayed (using the necessary application) to the user.
- request for acknowledgement of successful delivery.
- request for acknowledgement when a message has been read.
- a user local "address book" address lookup facility.
- addresses can be loaded manually, copied from incoming mail,
or copied from an X.500 DUA (see next).
- integration with X.500 Directory Services:
- the user can query local and network-wide address information
while composing messages.
- addresses can be copied from the Directory User Agent to the
user's local address book.
- this facility will be optionally available for those who
have the Directory Service capability.
With the new Message Store (Unix MS only)
- automatic reply to messages.
- automatic forwarding of messages to a different address.
- asynchronous notification of incoming mail (outside of a running
MUA).
With the new MTA's
- support for centralized fax delivery (Unix MTA only)
- messages composed in the mailer can be sent to a
fax machine address.
- an MTA will be provided for mail delivery subsystems that
can deliver the fax mail.
- an X.400 MTA
And that just begins to list all of imua's abilities! We are sure that
you would be interested in hearing more about this new development; just
send any inquiries to:
and we will be happy to keep you informed.
**** NOTE ****
It is our intention to provide this software along with pre-configured
public domain source code to support all the new features (especially
the MTA and MS features). This will be available *free of charge* in
the final package. It is still unclear as to whether source code for
imua will be distributed as well.
There will be a charge for the distribution of the material. We don't
know how much, but it will be low. We feel that we have to charge
something in order to fund the continued development of the software.
-- Steve Hole mail: steve@edm.isac.ca ISA Corp. phone: (403) 441-4121 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:17 CDT