RE: Sending e-mails from AS/400

["David Morris" <David.Morris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom,

MSF is the foundation for all of the native email support on the
AS/400. It provides a bunch of exit points and APIs that were
probably useful to someone developing a product like office,
but are not useful to anyone else. You get that extra support,
which is prone to failure at the least opportune time.

I have worked on several AS/400 email solutions, and MSF
worked but hides important information and is very poorly
documented. If you want to build an AS/400 or iSeries based
e-mail server _product_, I would look porting a C application,
the Apache James project, or some other modern (open) base.

David Morris


>>> thomas@inorbit.com 03/04/02 10:19PM >>>
David:

On Tue, 26 February 2002, "David Morris" wrote:

> Most of the email support on the AS/400 is "old" and retains
> too much office baggage. The SNDDST command along
> with the QTMM APIs, all use the AnyMail Mail Server Framework
> APIs under the covers. That support was OK five years ago, but
> it has not been enhanced in a long time and overly complicates
> the process.

I've wondered about this since first reading and wanted to ask a
question. I recognize that the SNA/DS basis of SNDDST is becoming
irrelevant, but I'm not clear on how much of that's tied to the Mail
Server Framework (MSF) itself.

I've tended to think that the MSF is excellent for someone who wants to
create an actual AS/400 or iSeries based e-mail server _product_, but
it's overkill for the more common simple tasks most of us are interested
in. I'm not sure any other system provides anything remotely like MSF.
(Of course, nowadays, no one's likely to be creating new e-mail server
products just for the iSeries market.)

So, were you specifically referring to the MSF itself? or more to the
difficulty in using it for the common tasks we often face?

Tom Liotta



--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
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