OTHER APPLICATIONS (MAIL & WWW)

Electronic Mail at CERN, RAL, & DESY

CERN uses MicroSoft Mail on PC with the MicroSoft Mail Post Office under Novell. They report that it is not MIME compliant and MicroSoft seems not to have plans to make it compliant. On Macs they use QuickMail with the StarNine Gateway. For UNIX they use elm & pine, the Sun mail tool, & zmail which is bundled on SGI. They looked at Oracle Mail but rejected it since it was not RFC822 compliant, had problems with return addresses and the user interface was not easy to use.

DESY is testing email packages. They feel MicroSoft Mail still needs MIME capability. They are interested in POP/IMAP/Eudora. They would like the clients to be consistent across platforms. They are not very happy with zmail on the SGIs.

RAL are looking at MicroSoft Mail and ccMail for PC and Eudora for Macs. At the moment most mail is mainly read and sent on the VM System.

The UK is converting to "world order" email addressing (see Flagship 28 p. 10) so mail will now be in the form Fred@vax.oxford.ac.uk instead of Fred@uk.ac.oxford.vax.

WWW Support at CERN

The ECP division at CERN has 5 people providing Information Systems services. In particular they are providing help to the experiments to set up their own WWW servers. They are also looking at what they call meta documentation to cover the complete lifecylce of a project from planning documents, specifications, software listings etc. all linked together with hypertext links. They have a FrameMaker to WWW converter and also a word to HTML converter.