[TUHS] Mailer History -- was Berkeley CSRG Building

[Kevin Bowling]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 11:59 AM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, August 14th, 2024 at 9:45 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at 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.  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.

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