[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Mailer History -- was Berkeley CSRG Building

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Kevin Bowling wrote in
 <CAK7dMtAH0km=RLqY0Wtuw6R7jXyWg=xQ+SPWcQA-PLLaTZii0w@mail.gmail.com>:
 |On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 11:59 AM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
 |> On Wednesday, August 14th, 2024 at 9:45 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> \
 |> wrote:
 |>> ...
 |>> The issue came when people started using the mail system as a programmat\
 |>> ic messaging scheme (i.e., fork: some_program | mail user) and other \
 |>> programs started to parse the output.
 |>> ...
 |> Mail as IPC...that's what I'm reading from that anyway...now that's \
 |> an interesting concept.  Did that idea ever grow any significant \
 |> legs?  I can't tell if the general concept is clever or systems abuse, \
 |> in those days it seems like it could've gone either way.
 |
 |I like Clem's answer on mail IPC/RPC.
 |
 |To add I have heard some stories of NNTP being used once upon a time
 |at some service providers the way ansible/mcollective/salt might be
 |used to orchestrate UNIX host configurations and application
 |deployments.  The concept of Control messages is somewhat critical to
 |operations, so it's not totally crazy, but isolating article flows
 |would give me some heartburn if the thing has privileged system
 |access.. would probably want it on a totally distinct
 |instance+port+configuration.
 |
 |Email and Usenet both have some nice properties of implementing a
 |"Message Queue" like handling offline hosts when they come back.  But
 |the complexity of mail and nntp implementations lean more towards
 |system abuse IMO.

The IETF will go for SML (structured email)

  https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/sml/about/

which then goes for machine interpretable email message( part)s.

 |> I guess it sorta did survive in the form of automated systems today \
 |> expecting specially formatted emails to trigger "stuff" to happen.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)