mhonarc-users

Re: NT and MHonArc

1997-09-11 15:01:07
At 01:45 PM 9/11/97 -0400, Kevin M. Andres wrote:
I will be migrating several web sites to an NT-based architecture in the
next several weeks.  The previous OS for the sites has been Linux and
Sun Solaris.  Is anyone aware of any special issues I may encounter with
Mhonarc, I plan to use Sendmail but have been considering MS Exchange?
Any experience?

1. MHonArc works well under DOS and Win95, thanks to Earl's very portable
code and the quality of the Perl ports to DOS and Win32.  It uses the
following code (in osinit.pl) to determine if it is running on DOSish
platform like this (as opposed to a Unixish one):

    if (($tmp = $ENV{'COMSPEC'}) && ($tmp =~ /[a-zA-Z]:\\/) && (-e $tmp)) {

If you're not a Perite, this checks for the existence of an environment
variable named COMSPEC that contains a string that points to an executable
file.  I have no idea whether this concept exists under NT.  If not, there
is probably something else that Perl can sense that would be always present
on the DOSish platforms but never on Unices.

2. Exchange presumably stores its messages in a MS proprietary format
(perhaps the COM object store used with Exchange clients?).  This would be
far from the plain text formats that MHonArc can deal with.  However, I
believe that Exchange has a POP3 server, so you could (1) create accounts
in Exchange to receive messages destined for MHonArc (2) run a POP3 mail
retriever to talk to the server, saving messages in text form (there are
such retrievers in Perl), and (3) have MHonArc convert the files created by
step 2.

-- SP

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