fred avolio's musings

My friend David Strom recently posted a video review of this enterprise e-mail management product from Sendmail, Inc. His review is at Webinformant.tv.

Sendmail has come a long way since I wrote this review of Sendmail Pro, over 9 years ago!

“Hello from Ms vivian shaka, I am writing with the earnest prayer that my attention will meet favorably with you.”

I really want to reply and say, “Hey, Viv! What the heck does that even mean?! ‘My attenion will meet favorably with you,’ indeed!”

In Mail and Gmail and More on Mail and Gmail, I discuss my move to Gmail as my main avolio.com mail server.

Gmail Glitch Shows Pitfalls starts off with “When Google Inc.’s online-email service shut off for over two hours earlier this week, it brought to light concerns about whether businesses can safely rely on software that their employees access over the Internet.” The Wall Street Journal On-line article goes on to say, “… companies are finding that going online to do business-computing tasks via services like Google’s … comes with a risk: When something goes wrong, customers must sit idly while waiting for someone else to fix the problem.”

I say this is FUD. Who doesn’t have to suffer occasional outages? Servers go down, ISPs disconnect occasionally, cables get cut. Owning the servers and employing those who run them may feel safer, but I suspect does little to mitigate the risk of an outage.

Is it worth the risk? I think so.

Sometimes I do a quick scan of my Spam folder. See the attached annotated image from my Google Mail Spam folder. (Click for a larger image.)

Previously, I’ve “promoted” work by my friend and colleague, Dave Piscitello. I mentioned both him and Radio Free Security in Router Rooter

Recently, in Dave’s blog, Security Skeptic, he has talked about phishing in Making Waves in the Phishers’ Safest Harbors and Phlavors of Phishing

In a recent posting, David Strom, who might be trying to rejuvenate sales for his very excellent, but old, book he co-authored with Marshall Rose, Internet Messaging: From the Desktop to the Enterprise , discusses Ten years of email. I recommend reading it for the history, for a sense of how far we’ve come, and to be disappointed that we’ve not progressed further. Then check out my Secure E-mail Collection

I commented the following to David’s post:

I’ve long ago switched from POP to IMAP, but cannot imagine having to rely on Internet access to read or manipulate e-mail. I’d love for you to talk about the changes that doing that requires. I just cannot imagine.

David replied:

About two years ago, I lost some saved emails using T-bird, and I decided to look carefully at what I was doing and what I could to ensure that didn’t happen again. I saw that 99% of the time when I am composing messages, I am sitting online, usually in my office, or someplace else where I have a Net connection. I had heard about Gmail and took a look and was immediately hooked. There were four things that motivated to switch over (and these might not be as important to you as they were for me):

First, I don’t have to worry about saving and storage of messages Google does it for me. And as their mailbox keeps getting bigger faster than I need, it is limitless as far as I am concerned. Now others may have run up against this limit, and now Yahoo email is truly infinite, but I hate their UI. I think I have about 2 of GB of mail, and as I mentioned in my post Gmail is above 7 GB and adding more every day. At the time, they didn’t have IMAP, but now that they do it makes for some choices here.

Second, they did a great job with labels, making it very flexible to store messages in multiple buckets. The latest versions of Outlook also do this, and I haven’t checked the Mac, Vista, and T-bird versions lately but at the time I switched they didn’t do as good a job. If you do use IMAP and have lots of labelled messages, you will find this vexing however.

Third, I use multiple machines, both PC and Mac, and having all my email and contacts in the Gmail cloud is a real plus for me. I don’t miss having local email on my desktop at all.

Finally, they did a great job with groups of contacts, and making it easy to organize my contacts is really at the heart of what I do with my email. I can have one contact as a member of multiple groups, to make it easier to find and communicate with people. Again, the newer versions of many email programs all support this, but at the time I was switching this wasn’t the case. I usually have two windows open in my browser at all times the Mail and Contacts windows.

There are some issues with Gmail, however, not enough to make me switch at this point. First, the numerous outages over the past few weeks that is troubling. Second, the latest UI doesn’t work with the large volume of contacts and the many groups of them that I have I still have to run the older UI, luckily they have a switch to “older version” that I use. And exporting your contacts doesn’t export the groupings, so once again I am captive to Gmail until I can figure this out.

Since I switched Gmail supports now both POP and IMAP access to their mail store, and there are programs like Cemaphore.com’s MailShadow for Google Apps that can synchronize an Outlook/Exchange account with a Gmail one. That makes the line between online/cloud email and local email more blurred. It all comes down to what UI you like, and where you want to keep your contacts, and how much offline composition and contact lookup you do: in my case, very little, and these days just about everywhere I go I can find a connection.

The other thing going for Google is that Google Apps is free to host your email for your domain, so you have the best of both worlds — you have the large online storage, the Gmail UI, and your own domain dot com — plus I think up to 100 mailboxes — all for free. It used to take a few days to get this going, but last week it took about an hour to setup, switch my MX records, and I was good to go. I don’t see why anyone would want to host their emails anywhere else.

Of course, this gives me a single point of failure with Google now, so I might keep that Yahoo email box around a bit longer :-).

While this series of articles is Mac-specific and Mail-specific, most of the tips offered can be used with other e-mail clients on other platforms. It is all about productivity. I know people who have no such scheme and are burdened by the guilt (or just stress) of hundreds (or more) unread or “undealt-with” e-mails in their inbox. As the waiter in the 1971 television advertisement for Alka-Seltzer urges his customer, “Try it, you’ll like it.” Unlike the customer, trying these suggestions should lessen the need for an antacid.

See

• Turn down the volume on your e-mail
• The fast way to file your e-mail
• Clean out old e-mail messages

Here are other excellent resources for getting a handle on e-mail. And, as you probably know, handling ths problem is very important. (See the comment in Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters, that says, “Even the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.”) So, the additional resource: Inbox Zero and the Inbox Zero video. Both are from Merlin Man.

Short version: using e-mail ‘stetionery’ is evil. Don’t do it.

In my posting Leopard: The Good Stuff I say

One feature Mail could have done without: stationery. Stationery is terrificfor hand-written mail. All it does is add an image attachment that may or may not be seen as a “background” to the e-mail. (Many times it will not show upit depends on the e-mail client. The user will then click on the attachment to see it and it will make them wonder why you send them a fabric swatch.)

I have repeatedly suggested against it every time someone has mentioned it in the Apple discussion forums. I’ve written, “As I’ve stated before on these forums, just because it looks good in your e-mail client does not mean that it will display correctly in someone else’s. Sometimes the ‘stationery’ will be transmitted as an attachment. The recipient will get your e-mail and an attachment. They will have to click on the attachment to see it. And they will see the ‘stationery’ only. It would be like sending a postal letter with the words written on a plain white sheet of paper, and sending along with it a nice piece of colored stationery.”

A friend sent me e-mail the other day. He “signed his name” at the bottom with a GIF image of his handwritten name, “Joe.” It, was, of course, an attachment. It showed up fine in e-mail, but when I forwarded the message, I forwarded his plain text e-mail plus the attachment with his name.

Someone else consistently sends me e-mail with a fancy signature image, containing her company logo. Every time I reply—and include the e-mail—the fancy signature is sent along. She replies, and now there are two copies if it, and so on.

You, the sender, have no control over what the recipients’ e-mail client can and cannot view. Sticking to plain text e-mail means that you can communicate with the greatest number of people. If you must have fancy fonts, and colorful backgrounds, send it in a PDF.

Plain text is best.

Use Rich Text if you must.

But, don’t use stationery (unless it is in hard-copy, postal mail).

I just need to figure out how to code this up: IF

• The From: address is all in capital letters
• The word “widow” is in the message body
  and either
  • The Subject is “greetings in the name of the lord!”
    or
  • The Subject: is in Hebrew (this won’t work for everyone, I know)

it is spam.

Apparently, in it’s never-ending battle to thwart spam, Comcast (apparently) recently started to require that connecting e-mail servers have a valid PTR record so Comcast’s email servers can do a PTR (pointer) record lookup. This allows a look-up on your IP address to see if the IP address and the value returned—it should be the computer’s domain namematch.

Now, I am not sure of a different way to do it, but Comcast chose a way that many choose. They returned it in a bounced error message.

Providentially, I knew this was coming. For some reason, I checked the mail queue on the server. This is what I saw.

242C7AFEC0D2 9406 Thu Jun 19 12:25:40
listname@example.org (connect to mx1.comcast.net[76.96.62.116]: server refused to talk to me:
554 IMTA08.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast 66.242.23.142 Comcast requires that all mail servers must have a PTR record with a valid Reverse DNS entry. Currently your mail server does not fill that requirement. For more information, refer to:
http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18784)
alpha@comcast.net
charlie3@comcast.net
delta4@comcast.net
echo5@comcast.net
foxtrot6@comcast.net
gold7@comcast.net
hotel8@comcast.net

Later, one of the errors was returned to the list owner (me).

<delta4@comcast.net>: delivery temporarily suspended: connect to mx2.comcast.net[76.96.30.116]: server refused to talk to me: 554 IMTA01.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net comcast 66.242.23.142 Comcast requires that all mail servers must have a PTR record with a valid Reverse DNS entry. Currently your mail server does not fill that requirement. For more information, refer to: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18784

Now, I am fairly Internet, DNS, and SMTP e-mail clueful. What would (what do) the average person do with this error message? They should go to the indicated URL. It suggests going to your email administrator. Many people stop right there, eyes glazed over.

The funny thing in this case? Although the server was not in a Comcast address space, the server domain is a customer of Comcast. I’m thinking the error message could have been clearer.

The headline said Lilly’s $1 Billion E-Mailstrom. Katherine Eban opened with, “A secret memo meant for a colleague lands in a Times reporter’s in-box.”

The short version is that typing in a recipient’s last name first expanded in the sender’s email client (it could have been any email client) to a Times reporter with the same last name instead of the sender’s co-counsel. That should never happen. But, it happens all the time. It usually has benign results. Why, just the other day I sent a short email message to a friend, I’ll call him Andy Jones. I typed in his email address from memory: ajones@example.com. Except that wasn’t his address. I did not get a reply, I knew he usually replied quickly, and I saw by his IM screen name that he was on and active. So, I looked up his email address to be sure. I had left out a letter. He used his middle name: abjones@example.com. Bummer. But, no harm done. It was short, nothing-secret-about-it kind of note. But, this story and my example, reminded me of something from a past company.

Up in the UNIX support group at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), in the olden days, everyone there used the same VAX computer, decvax. It was a major UUCP gateway (look it up—it’s part of your history!). On this central computer, there was a mail aliases file. Usually, such a file is used for mailing list support. For example, ultrix-engineers might expand to the email addresses of the entire group of software engineers. That’s a good use for distribution lists. One day a product manager sent a note out to internal folks about what she was working on, DECWindows. She sent it to what she thought was internal folks… not even a distribution list. She sent email to—and I am making up these names now: joe, mary, ken, tom, and jane.

The next day, she got a note from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs saying, basically, I don’t think this was meant for me. See the developer she wanted to send to, Ken Smith, used his initials for his mailbox, kts. The mailbox “ken” … well you see where it went to. It could have been worse. In that same file there was a mailbox “bill” which went to Bill Shannon and “joy” that did not go to Joy Dormat, but rather to Bill Joy. Shannon, formerly an employee of DEC UEG and Joy, formerly at UC Berkeley—which expains the “why?” of their emails being in the DEC aliases file—both had moved to Sun Microsystems, a major DEC competitor. Now, that wasn’t the same problem as what happened to Lilly. Back then, email clients did not auto-complete addresses. It is a worse problem today. One types and the email client fills in a name, we hit and go on to typing the next name, and so on. It is a problem with some technical solutions, but solutions that we mostly ignore because “it just won’t happen to us, and even if it did, what could happen?” There are solutions out there. I bet that Ely Lilly’s outside law firm gets an email firewall.

(In the past, I’ve written about, lectured about, and reviewed products, and recommended policies, that mitigate risks like this. It really is old stuff, that has already been managed. We just don’t bother. See my Secure E-mail Collection.)

I’ve noticed emails with an exe at the end of them… just not “.exe.” For example, I have one with attachment “attach3781.txt.  exe”.

Be careful out there.

I—like a lot of you—was getting lots of “buy this hot stock” spam. The latest change I made to my Postfix installation is to add a check against the Spamhaus Block List. The addition to main.cf is under smtpd_client_restrictions, which now looks like this:

smtpd_client_restrictions =
check_client_access hash:/etc/postfix/accessi
reject_rbl_client sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

Previous articles and blogs:

• NetSec Letter #27, Spam Control
• My Current Spam Barrier , and
• My Most Current Spam Barrier.

It seems to be working well.

Well, Spamhause has been in the news. This will give you all you need to know in case you’ve missed it.

As of a few weeks ago, I was still having the problem I mentioned in Still Love and Hate Mail. I had found that if I remembered to Go Offline, then Go Online again, all was well. If not, the Mail client and the IMAP server got confused about what my Inbox looked like. Clearly, the mailbox state wasn’t being updated until I disconnected. I religiously read the Apple discussion groups (for example, this thread). And found the solution.

As I posted in the above-mentioned thread

RE: IMAP deleted mail won’t stay deleted…
Posted: Sep 12, 2006 9:39 AM

> The following is an example of such a thread, and it
> contains a more extensive discussion of what the
> issue really is and why manually taking the account
> offline/online might work:
>
> http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=586858


I looked at this before, but I looked at it again and here is what I did. This may be something you can try. I am trying it. So far, so good.

You need to change your INBOX to .mbx format. (See http://www.washington.edu/imap/IMAP-FAQs/index.html#4.5 wherein we read,

If you create an mbx-format INBOX, by creating “#driver.mbx/INBOX” (note that “INBOX” must be all uppercase), then subsequent access to INBOX by any c-client based application will use the mbx-format INBOX. Any mail delivered to the traditional format mailbox in the spool directory (e.g. /var/spool/mail/$USER) will automatically be copied into the mbx-format INBOX and the spool directory copy removed.

Okay, cool How to create the INBOX. Conntect to your IMAP server using a telnet client and then issue the commands needed to create it. I saved my Inbox contents first, but this actually should not touch the spoolfile mailbox (On a UNIX system, this is something like /var/mail/fred for me and is in UNIX mailbox format.)

So, in terminal I did this (this is exactly what I typed except I typed in my real incomingmailserver name and my real password):

telnet incomingmailserver 143
a001 login fred mypassword
a001 create #driver.mbx/INBOX
a001 logout


See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2060.txt for IMAP commands.

Seems to be working fine. (It created INBOX in ~fred on my server, by the way.)

Fred

It is still working exactly as it is supposed to and I am completely happy with Mail.

I mentioned earlier—in Moving to the Mac, E-mail—that I had moved to using the mail application (Mail.app) on my PowerBook. I am also using IMAP, as I mentioned, connecting with my e-mail server. My e-mail is stored on my PowerBook and on the server. As I think I mentioned, one cool thing about it is I can read my mail using anything that will read UNIX mbox format and any IMAP client.

And I thought I was ready to ditch Mail.app. I found it would … occasionally … reload all the e-mail in my server’s mailbox. See, on most UNIX, or Linux, systems, e-mail is deposited in a user’s mailbox (for example, /var/mail/fred). E-mail clients read from there. That is what Mail (or Thunderbird) calls my “Inbox.” As I delete or refolder messages, the IMAP server (I assume) or maybe just the e-mail client notes the change, and waits to update things until some opportune time. I am being nebulous here because it seems to be e-mail client specific. Logging off (“Go offline”) will do it in Mail as it will in Thunderbird. (Compressing a mailbox will do the same thing in Thunderbird.)

It was very frustrating. There are some things I really like about the Apple Mail client. For example:

• Connection with the Address Book. Very nice. Yes, Thunderbird does this with it’s own address book, but I sync my Palm Computer (pet peeve—there hasn’t been anything called “PalmPilot” for like 10 years. US Robotics made it. I had one. Had to change the name when Pilot Pen Company complained. No joke.) with the Address Book (see Mac Calendaring and Address Book. One down side is the programs insistence to rewrite headers. If e-mail comes in from “Charlie Applerot ” and I have a calendar entry for him, but it says “Charles Applerot,” it uses what is in the Address Book. I don’t mind it recognizing it is the same e-mail address. I don’t like it changing what was in the message header. (It doesn’t actually change it in the message file. But, if I reply to the message, it uses the rewrittenm address. This is bad behavior.) Still the integration of Address Book is useful.
• Smart Mailbox. This is the read cool stuff. A Smart Mailbox is one that looks at all messages that match a set of search criteria based on headers, body, attachment count, date, etc., and shows all that match in the Smart Mailbox, no matter what actual mailboxes they might be in. I automatically “folder” some mailing list messages as they come in rather than leaving them in the Inbox. I set up a “Smart Mailbox” that simply is “all unread e-mail.” I also sometimes “flag” e-mail—mark it as special. (Mail does not have a list of tags like Eudora and Thunderbird has; all it has is flagged or not.) So, I have a Smart Mailbox that shows me all “flagged” mail in one virtual mailbox.

Nevertheless, I had decided with the Inbox flakiness, that Mail.app must go. I would move to Thunderbird! I spend a few hours recreating filters that I used in Mail that I wanted in Thunderbird. I worked for hours fiddling to get Address Book records to Thunderbird. (Address Book doesn’t export in anything but “vcard” format. Thunderbird, correct, does not read vcard format. I used Address Book Exporter.)

I started using Thunderbird. I missed Mail.app, but as I said earlier, I had liked and recommended Thunderbird. And it’s an IMAP client, so I still had plain text files on the server and on the PowerBook. Thunderbird is not as integrated with the Mac as Mail.app is (natch). It allows complex searches; Mail.app only allows them in a Smart Folder (which is not really a problem). It has seven, count them seven, “labels” for tagging messages. And I was happy.

Until the same thing happened with Thunderbird: e-mail’s I had taken care of— deleted, refolder—showed up again!

Hmmmm. Maybe it is the IMAP server on Linux. Someone recommended Dovecot. Swore by it (I mean that in a nice way). I tried setting it up. I couldn’t get the user authentication to work. There is no real documentation. Yes, I know. “Use the Source, Luke.” I’m getting too old. Now that I have a second server on the Internet, I may try it to see if it plays nicer. Or perhaps someone can give me a clue as to where to look for what exactly is happening. Is there a setting to “only connect when downloading and sending? Is it some mode setting on the /var/mail directory? (I tried it 755 and 1777. Same behavior.)

I am using Mail.app again. Periodically, I try to remember to “Go offline” then “Go online” again. I am settled but not fully satisfied. You know?

I am again leading Secure Email Day at Interop New York on Monday, December 12, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Secure Email Day is a mixture of lecture, expert-lead group discussion, and a vendor panel. Again, Jon Callas, CTO and CSO of PGP Corporation will join me for part of the day. You can go to the interop link, above, to get a look at the schedule for the day, or visit my blog posted before Vegas at SecureEmailDay.html.

I’ve written and lectured many times about e-mail security. Sometimes, I discuss securing e-mail systems. I rarely discuss protecting e-mail against modification or eavesdropping, because it seems we just don’t care. See what I’ve written in the past at my Secure E-mail Collection. And recently, I blogged E-mail Security: We Still Don’t Bother

I also have written about my love affair with the Eudora e-mail client, but thoughts of moving over to Thunderbird.

But, I like Thunderbird’s interface. I like its being free. I like its older brother, Firefox. I recommend moving to Thunderbird to others. I almost moved a while back. But, there were some speed bumps, blogged here. But, recently I decided to slowly give it another try.

So far, things are working smoothly. I’ve not cut over to using it instead of Eudora, yet. But, I find some interesting security features. Recall, in the aforementioned E-mail Security: We Still Don’t Bother, my friend Dave wrote,

I am disappointed that I have to give up PGP but could not reasonably continue to purchase $100-200 worth of email and security software for the purpose of communicating with 9 people. What a sad indictment on the state of email security, huh?

Well, I’ve got Thunderbird with PGP and S/Mime now. It was fairly straightforward. First, S/MIME: Thunderbird comes with it. I followed the instructions for Getting an S/MIME certificate. I got mine from Thawte. Then I followed those for installing the certificate. And it just worked.

For PGP, I used the Thunderbird Enigmail plugin. But first, I installed GPG (in this case, for Windows), using the installer I found at www.gnupg.org. It installed smoothly.

if you are not going to install existing key rings you can skip the next step.

I then downloaded my secret and private PGP key rings, and used GPG from the command line to read convert them to GPG from PGP. (I did this in the GnuPG folder.) Once I did this, I installed the Enigmail extension to Thunderbird, restarted it and imported the key files using Enigmail’s key manager.

If you are new to all this, you’ll use Enigmail to create your first key pair and store it.

This will be your decryption and signing key pair. Since I had one already, I needed to fiddle with Thunderbirds configuration file to point to my key. Actually, I had created a keypair, and had a horrible time trying to get it to use my old one. But, finally I figured it out. So, go ahead and generate a new one. Ff you want to use the old one, edit the prefs.js file (in your Thunderbird identity folder), and edit the “mail.identity.id3.pgpkeyId” value to have your key ID. Mine looks like this:
user_pref(“mail.identity.id3.pgpkeyId”, “0x3521CEA0”);

A restart of Thunderbird, and everything is working. If only people actually used encrypted mail…

Okay, I spoke too soon. There are imcompatibilities I cannot figure out between GPG and PGP Personal Privacy 6.5.2 that I run. GnuPG can decrypt and verify a PGP signed and encrypted file. And GnuPG can handle one that GnuPG signs and encrypts. But, PGP cannot decrypt a GPG-encrypted file. I get the error “An error has occurred : encrypted session key is bad”. So, what is Mom and Pop supposed to do? Arrrrg!

I was unclear in explaining how I did some of the above. I used Firefox to get my certificate. Following Mozilla instructions, which say, “If you use Firefox to get your certificate and take the Netscape/Messenger option, a certificate silently installs into Firefox.” I got a Netscape/messenger certificate from Thawte. It works fine with Tbird.

I just got a PGP ecrypted message from a Thunderbird/Enigmail user, Jason Wyman. He wrote, Just wanted to let you know that I have PGP set up with Enigmail in Thunderbird and it is working GREAT for me. I’ve had a lot of time to fiddle with several different set ups as I’ve “converted” my friends and clients at work. With me using PGP Desktop 9.0 and Mail.app on my PowerBook, it decrypted and authenticated great. Thanks, Jason!

Jason wrote back: I just noticed you updated your blog with an excerpt from my email to you. I was going to suggest that you post this email address along with my PGP key for anyone who may need help…. I’d be happy to help. I believe it’s very important that more people begin to take their privacy seriously. This would be an opportunity for me to help others make their own lives a little more secure. You can contact Jason and get his public PGP key at http://home.comcast.net/~jason.wyman/ or at keyserver http://keyserver.pgp.com/.

I cannot believe anyone reading this has not heard of the “Nigerian Scam” (also called 419 after the Nigerian anti-fraud statute). The most common, that I receive every once in a while, has to do with someone — a widow or son of the recently assassinated political leader someone-or-other in some African nation. (I suppose they assume, rightly, that Americans especially won’t have a clue of this particular person exists, was recently assassinated, etc.) There are millions of dollars in a bank account and the sender of the email heard about your integrity doing an Internet search. They suggest a money laundering scheme for which the recipient gets %10 just for playing… er, helping.”

I just read a fascinating piece on this at news.yahoo.com/s/latimests/20051020/ts_latimes/iwilleatyourdollars describing this in interesting detail.

Recently, I’ve been blogging about my move from PC to Mac (see PC2Mac. In my next entry, I’ll talk about selecting an e-mail client. E-mail is very important to me. (See what I wrote about this in Disconnect.) So, I started thinking about all the e-mail clients (user-end programs) I used over the years. At the risk of revealing my advanced years, here is the list.

West Hempstead High School, NY
I don’t remember the name of it, but it was the local e-mail system on the DEC-10 timesharing system to which we connected via an acoustical coupler using a Teletype teleprinter. (That’s a papertape reader/writer on the left.) Practically speaking, there was no one to e-mail (except the system manager). There was no Internet. (But, we were happy.) University of Dayton
I don’t recall e-mail. Maybe. We used a Univac Spectra 70/7 timesharing machine. (It is mentioned and pictured in this personal history from my classmate, Ken.)

NSA
/bin/mail on a (pre-TCP/IP) networked 6th Edition Unix system. This is essentially the same mail program on the command lines of Unix systems today.

Digital Equipment Corporation

• VMS MAIL, from the command line.
• ALL-IN-1 e-mail on VMS (an early Outlook- or Entourage-like character-cell e-mail program. (Like Outlook, it ignores standards.)
• Berkeley Mail on Ultrix
• MH, when I grew up.
• Emac mail, for a while
• xmh, when I got a workstation and X11

TIS
xmh Avolio Consulting

• Eudora
• Now, on the Mac… I’ll post something soon.

Holy cow! After I wrote this and I was re-reading it, I took a detailed look at the web page I point to above under University of Dayton. I had discoverd the site simply by Googling for “Univac Spectra 70/7.” So, I did not actually read it in detail. When I did I had a few “Whoa now!” moments. I noticed that my computing environment at the University of Dayton was similar to this guys. I mean even the picture of the CRT terminal. But, then how many of them where there? 1976… interesting. Then — yipes! He mentions one of my UD profs—the guy that taught my first programming class, Ed Krall. And then he mentions another guy I knew, Dr. Mike May. Then I looked at the bottom, the first time the author’s name appeared. Ken Koehler… he and I graduated together, used those same computers, and were in many of the same classes from freshman year on. Haven’t seen or communicated with him since gradutation…until now, when I dropped him a note.