PM Mail/2 under a Novel/Pegasus system

[Simon Bowring]

>I am using PMMail/2 under a Novel/Pegasus mail system. With PMMail/2 I can 
read all 
>my incoming mail after I have loged on to the Novel server. PMMail/2 can 
read the 
>mail in my SMTP/Incoming path. I could not determine how to get PMMail/2 to 
use this 
>Novel/Pegasus setup to send mail. Luckily, I can send my mail through a 
SMTP server, 
>but I was told that I can not depend on the continued availability of this 
server.

Firstly let me make it clear that it's a good number of years since I used
pegasus mail in a mixed netware (3.12?) and "ip" environemnt, so things may 
well have changed or moved on or not be 100% accurate! And in this 
discussion "pmail" = pegasus mail, and "pmmail" = blueprint's pmmail!

There's a few things I don't really understand - the old pmail used to 
transfer mail between netware users by simply copying files between users'
mail directories on the netware server, but later versions can use smtp/pop.
How is pmail used at your site? Can your pmail/netware users send email 
out to the internet, or is it an internal system only?

When you read your email using pmmail, presumably you have pointed your
"SMTP Path to incoming mail" to point to your netware mail directory
on the novel server and "luckily" pmail must store the email in the 
correct (unix mailbox?) format.

But when you send (internal) mail using pmmail, how does it get to 
other pmail/netware users - there must be a gateway somewhere 
(unless you simply cannot send mail to internal pmail users)?
 
We used to run an old 286 running some free DOS software called "the charon
gateway" (AFAIR) - this bridged between the proprietry novel/pmail mail
system and the smtp/pop standards based tcp/ip world.  [Incidently this 
already old Zenith PC ran charon continuously for nearly four years 24x7 
with a fair amount of disk activity before it was finally turned off! 
The only times I remember it ever crashing were due to power-cuts and 
brown-outs].

To use PMMail (or any normal internet standards based mailer), uou're really
going to need an pop and/or smtp server (some mailers support imap, as well, 
but not pmmail).  This "server" need not be a remote machine, it could be 
a process running on your local machine that "knows" how to bridge between
the ip and netware worlds (I've no idea if such s/w exists!).

I would try to find out why you cannot depend on the continued availability 
of your smtp server, since open standards and ip is the future and netware 
is the past!

BTW: What version of netware do you use - I'm surprised novell don't offer
     smtp/pop/imap on netware by now?

Regards

Simon Bowring