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

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

[Clem Cole]

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Matt - I'm going to BCC: TUHS and move this to COFF - since while UNIX was
certainly in the mix in all this, it was hardly first or the only place it
happenned.

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 2:59 PM 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
> programmatic 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.

It's kind of funny the history.  ARPANET gives us FTP as a way to
exchange files.   So, people figure out how to hack the mailer to call FTP
to send a file remotely and set up a submit a cron/batch submission, a.k.a
RJE.  This is encouraged by DARPA because part of the justification of the
ARAPNET was to be able to share resources, and this enables supercomputers
of the day to be able to provide cycles to DARPA folks who might not have
access to larger systems.   Also, remember, mailers were local to systems
at that point.


So someone gets the bright idea to hooker the mailer into this system --
copy the "mail file" and set up a remote job to mail it locally.  Let's
just say this prioves to be a cool idea and the idea of intersystem email
begins in the >>ARPANET<< community.

So the idea of taking it to the next level was not that far off.  The
mailer transports started to offer (limited) features to access services.
By the time of Kurt's "delivermail" but he added a feature, thinking it was
system logs that allowed specific programs to be called.   In fact, it may
have been invented elsewhere but before Eric would formalize "vacation" -
Jim Kleckner and I hacked together a "awk" script to do that function on
the UCB CAD 4.1 systems.  I showed it to Sam and a few other people, and I
know it went from Cory to Evans fairly quickly.   Vacation(1) was written
shortly there after to be a bit more flexible than our original script.



  Did that idea ever grow any significant legs?

I guess the word here is significant.  It certainly was used where it made
sense.  In the CAD group, we had simulations that might run for a few
days.   We used to call the mailer every so often to send status and
sometimes do something like a checkpoint.  It lead to Sam writing syslogd,
particularly after Joy created UNIX domain sockets.   But I can say we used
it a number of places in systems oriented or long running code before
syslogd as a scheme to log errors, deal with stuff.



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

Exactly.
ᐧ

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

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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)