News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
|
||
|
Mail Starting 2/10/98 | |
First, when asking about NT mail servers, I used to use the one from EMWAC, which can be found at:
From: adamt@smginc.com (Adam Turoff);
Sent at Wed, 11 Feb 1998 11:02:36 -0500;
Tuesday's Questionshttp://emwac.ed.ac.uk/html/internet_toolchest/ims/ims.htm
The package comes with an SMTP server, a POP3 server and a control panel to admin them. It's developed by the European Microsoft WinNT Academic Centre, and it's freeware. It was rather painless to set up, and it was solid enough that I could turn my back away from it and not worry about it for months at a time.
Second, I noticed that Altavista's free Email site is running 1.2.4:
Here's the Netcraft query.
Which makes it a Unix box. Do you know of any other high profile sites that use Frontier on one box (like an old Mac) to do site development, but then shift the pages over to something more high powered?
I received a lot of flack about using a Mac app in a Win95 shop before Frontier 5. Now, we're still a Win95 shop and can consider Frontier, but can't use it in production because our servers are FreeBSD and Solaris. Having a few other sites to point to like altavista.iname.com would help my case immensely. :-)
I recently went through all the free/cheap mail servers I could find for NT. I settled on the Eudora Mailserver package.
From: luke@tymowski.org (Luke Tymowski);
Sent at Wed, 11 Feb 1998 10:05:25 -0500;
NT mail serversI picked Eudora because it's only $150, which is affordable, and it supports IMAP4, multiple domains, and mailing lists. It promises remote admin but so far I haven't figured out how that works yet. It's also very easy to configure at the server and it's very fast.
Another good one, if you need only POP3 and one domain, is put out by software.com. For 10 e-mail accounts or less it's free. Free version also comes with 2 mailing lists. It's configurable with a browser, and is very, very easy to configure and maintain. Also very fast. I used it for a few weeks until I decided I wanted IMAP4 badly enough. It's called Post.Office.
If you want to host your own mail server and your own mailing lists I highly recommend Eudora Mailserver.
You should also run your own DNS server. NT 4 comes with one, and I configured it in about 10 minutes for my own stuff. Conxion still hasn't got around to adding eastcoast.userland.com to their DNS tables. If you're running your own DNS server it would take 1 minute to add it.
You've no idea how relaxing, and empowering, it is to run your own servers (mail and DNS). Mail and DNS were always vastly more frustrating than Web servers (getting an ISP to make changes for you).
We use LSMTP (http://www.lsoft.com/) as a mail server on our NT box (http://www.gov.pe.ca/). It is rock solid, pleasantly flexible, has excellent tech support, and nicely liaises in with their LISTSERV product. We used it to send upwards of 50,000 outgoing messages over the Christmas season with narry a complaint.
From: peter@digitalisland.com (Peter Rukavina);
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 21:10:00 -0400;
Email under NTWe ponied up for a LSMTP license after trying out three or four shareware products, all of which were either flaky and crashed after a while or had other dismal properties.
Has anyone developed a chat room using Frontier?
From: David Lovvorn, dave@otn.com;
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 15:44:28 -0800;
Chat RoomsThere's a phenomenal mail server for NT made by Software.Com named Post.Office. They offer it in per-user increments, starting with a 10-user version that's 100% free. It runs as a service, is 100% administered via the web, and has great anti-spam-relay features. (Can you tell that it's what we use here?) The only problem so far is that it doesn't do IMAP, but since I'm not an IMAP person, that's not really a problem for me.
From: jlevine@siphoto.com (Jason Levine);
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 98 18:39:17 -0500;
Mail servers for NTThere's also a good mail server named iMail -- I've actually been thinking about running it on my backup mail server, just for the sake of having two different platforms to use, test, and play with. iMail can also run web-based mail readers, mail-to-pager gateways, and server status checkers. It does IMAP, in addition to SMTP & POP3.
Incidentally, if you go to http://www.ihub.com/, you'll find WebMail, one of the best things that I've ever seen on the web. It's a web-based mail client that supports POP3, IMAP, ccMail, MS Exchange, etc. etc.. It's independent of a mail server -- it is its own web server that is set up with usernames and passwords that correspond to mail accounts. I use it completely -- I stopped using Eudora when I bought WebMail for SI.
I have used NTMail and Digital's AltaVista Mail. Both are easy to set up, administer and perform pretty decently. I recommend them both. You can get NTMail from I nternet Shopper.
From: s_kevin@hotmail.com (Kevin Stewart);
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 13:35:40 PST;
Windows NT Mail serversI run a free package from EMWAC on my system (winser.com). It comes with smtp and pop3 support and is fairly easy to use. It also supports multiple domains fairly well. I doubt it is very high perf but it seems to do the job. EMWAC has changed their charter recently so it may or may not be available any more.
From: michaelw@microsoft.com (Michael Winser);
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 17:56:44 -0500;
Mail servers for NTThe NT resource kit (available for free on MS web site) also comes with a mail system (also pop3 and smtp). I haven't used it much but it seemed to work fine also.
If these are of interest let me know and I can probably dig up more detailed information.
MetaInfo's sendmail.
From: patti@merl.com (Chris Patti);
Sent at 10 Feb 1998 17:51:25 -0500;
Best mail server for Windows NT 4.0I have no affiliation with them, I'm just impressed with their product.
It occurs to me -- another thing Frontier could do for Apache is to provide a user interface. This is in addition to CGI stuff, the killer part of this.
From: brent@scripting.com;
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 14:27:49 -0800;
User Interface for Apache/NTI'm thinking: an outline of prefs, and perhaps a menu to update prefs, start and stop the server, that kind of thing. Apache Admin suite.
The idea being that no one would even think of setting up, administering, or developing content or CGI scripts for an Apache server on NT without Frontier.
I use Apache on Solaris boxes, and when I want to watch the log, I open a telnet session to it, and do: tail -f access_log
From: tommy.williams@Vanderbilt.Edu (Tommy Williams);
Sent at Tue, 10 Feb 1998 16:09:31 -0600;
Apache scrolling log windowBut, guess what? There's no 'tail' command in NT (at least as far as I can tell).
There have been ports of tail and a variety of other useful Unix command-line tools to NT. One good collection is at: NONAGS Command Line Tools.
Zoom Shell is probably what you want. It appears to support tail, command-line completion, and other goodies:
My Wintel box has not yet arrived (it is due on Friday), so I can't vouch for the quality of this product, although I intend to give it a shot.
I have been a Mac user since 1987 (and a Frontier user since version 1 -- still have the original disks and the two user manuals). I will be experimenting with NT at home for a while, and once I have gotten things stable, intend to switch at work.
The availability of Frontier for 32-bit Windows was the deciding factor.
I sure am going to miss BBEdit, though....
http://www.mc.Vanderbilt.Edu/~tommy/
