- Gateways. Both the Macs, and the PC's running
Microsoft Mail were tied together with proprietary, problematic gateways.
They hung. Constantly. They blew up attachments. MS Mail gateway uudecoded
/ uudecoded (in a weird perverted way) and the Mac gateway preferred MIME.
Mail clients on both sides reguarly sent huge attachments across the gateways,
which would crash the gateways hard. The MS Mail gateway was particuarly
problematic because Microsoft's implemented the gateway on DOS.
- NET/BEUI was the only supported protocol
for MS Mail on NT Server 3.1. This was a major pain. Further complications
included the requirement that the DOS SMTP gateway run TCP/IP and
NET/BEUI protocols. For a single-tasking OS with serious memory limitations,
it was amazing this worked at all. As message volume increased, this was
utterly hopeless. Towards the end, this gateway was crashing each day.
After it crashed, I would have to feed the Unix mail queue a few messages
at a time by hand, to keep from overloading this gateway and crashing it
again.
- MTA's - At this time the Microsoft Message transfer
agents for Microsoft came in two flavors, a single tasking DOS version,
and an OS/2 version. At least with the OS/2 version, I could run two
instances at a time on one machine, gaining some efficiency (using two
machines rather than four). These crashed often, as Microsoft made darn
sure the MTA software would run only on OS/2 2.1, and not the more stable
OS/2 Warp 3.0. This combination of NT 3.1 for the mailserver, OS/2 2.1
for the message transfer agents, and DOS for the SMTP gateway
reminded me of a Rube Goldberg device.
- Address syncronization. This was all done by hand
across the three systems. The proprietary nature of the Mac Quickmail/Starnine
Gateway and Microsoft Mail/SMTP gateway prevented any sane way of
exchanging address lists.
This mail system was a maintence nightmare, mail system users
lost mail and attachments constantly, and the address books for
the systems were inaccurate due to hand maintenence and sync. Facilities
to monitor the health of the systems were non-existent. This
mail system used 5 different operating systems and 3 different networking
protocols. Arrgg!
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