Oh also uhhhhh… I don’t remember what the unix/xenix was on the vaxen, I wasn’t on one for very long. Trivia, though: originally they were all named for muppets. And we had the dropcable-interface network hubs that were branded MPT, and I’ve looked for any sign of those and haven’t succeeded in finding them, and they were called “muppet boxes.” I _think_ but do not know that’s how we got to muppet names for mail servers.

(Sadly by the time I was there I my mail account was on “locust” because they’d run out of muppet names.)

No, we did! We did run it! All of Workgroup Applications division did, and I ran the server room for my entire division as part of our systems interop test initiative! That was one of the reasons our SMTP gateway was so good, it’s because we were running a fleet of it on our own network for years, when we had 10- to 100 times the mail volume of anyone else in the world.

People HATED moving from xenix mail to MS-Mail. HATED IT. Partly because wzmail (DOS xenix mail client) didn’t work against it and people hated change. (Raymond Chen got it running again but I’m not sure … that might’ve been against Exchange. But… no. I think he had it running against msmail for a while too. Not sure.)

But they also hated it because Bcc: didn’t really work the way you expected because of the database we inherited from Courier. (The Couter Mail database had no concept of envelope vs. display headers and fixing it would’ve been… a problem. And Exchange was going to replace it anyway.)

xenix mail was also a mess, just so you know. It wasn’t RFC-822 compliant so broke EVERYTHING if you weren’t on its own network, including parsing addresses in not-even-right-for-UUCP-or-RFC733 ways.

Also after 3.2 shipped and I managed to foist that lab off ITG (the actual systems management group at Microsoft), Bill and the exec team also got onto a true MS-MAIL server, just because of the optics of not being on one. ITG replaced me with _five_ people, which was hilarious because they were whiny as hell about it and I was like I DID ALL FIVE OF YOUR JOBS, NOW SUFFER LIKE I DID. xD

(The war between me personally and ITG was kind of the stuff of legend, because basically they saw our little server room as some kind of intrusion on their turf and wanted to stop it. Which would’ve been fine with me, I didn’t sign up for that, I signed up to write code, but there you are. And after I left, I kept getting CC:ed occasionally by people on MS-MAIL operations and after a while I finally went, “I _know_ you know I don’t do this anymore, why are you Cc:ing me?” and was told, “Okay. Look. Here’s what’s going on. When we need ITG to actually do something and not push back at us, we Cc: you on the mail, and they are _so afraid_ that you’ll actually get involved that they shut the hell up and just do it.” To which I replied, obviously, “You may continue to Cc: me on this topic until the END OF TIME.” xD )

Setting up the SMTP gateway is pretty easy, particularly if you run only a single post office, but you will need a smarthost because while it’s robust it’s not real smart? And also runs under DOS. So each gateway needs to talk to one (1) smarthost to do the actual routing. We used… uh.

dang, I forget. Interactive? We tried SCO and it was dogshit, which was hilarious and/or embarrassing because we had a partnership with them but I didn’t care… Yes, Interactive, that was it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation )

Anyway, because ITG would only let our smarthost talk to the Xenix mail servers via UUCP (and also artificially throttled the hell out of even that, because turf wars and fuck you guys) I ended up handcrafting a sendmail.cf compiler before those were things, and did name- and server-level least-travel-cost routing, just mass-rewriting headers on mail for best delivery. It was a nightmare but it worked as well as anything could. It was the kind of sendmail.cf that made people cry. Once again, I’m kinda proud of it. xD

(The code that made _me_ cry was our X.25/X.400 gateway. I was trying to fix a customer issue and… the original developer… wow. I never met her, but she was a mad genius and I mean both words. And unfortunately, she was gone by then. It was a state machine built out of a stack of TSRs that functionally implemented interrupt-driven multitasking on DOS and was _incredibly performant_ as a result but absolutely impossible to debug if you didn’t already understand it perfectly because even adding breakpoints would screw up the timing and change the problem. We had to NOT FIX that, which was fortunately okay because the network stack they were trying to use wasn’t on our supported list anyway. And it was also the only bug report we ever got after ship. Stuff of legend as far as _I’m_ concerned.)

Meanwhlie Microsoft never used msmail they were using that Unix based thing. The real burning question is where is Xenix for the PDP-11, and What Unix did they run on the VAXes?

Sadly in the era I was stuck on Lotus Notes, but you are right we were all x.400/x.25 back then, when you paid per email, and per kb. Those 5MB email attachments cost like $20 or something insane, I can still remember being yelled at for not knowing that some attachment went to an external address.

It wasn’t until 99 did I have to deal with Exchange. But 5.5 is pretty solid, I still use it! It was a snap to setup with Office 365, it lets you forward custom domains to a SSL fronted SMTP server.

I suppose if I ever got that SMTP gateway working it could go to MS Mail 3.5.. .

Oh, and, um, I presume you have the administrator’s guide in digital form, am I right? That way I won’t have to scan the 3.2 Beta… I think 1… version I just discovered I still have. xD

Former Microsoft Mail developer here. How y’doin’? Got here because I was trying to find out if anyone had digitised and uploaded the administration manual for the MMTA anywhere yet and found you.

First: Microsoft Mail for Macintosh was a different product entirely to Microsoft Mail for PC Networks, which is what you’re installing. They don’t share any code base or ancestry at all; one did not become the other. To be fair, the name confusion was SUPER annoying then, too. Mail for PC Networks was originally Courier Mail, out of Vancouver, BC, which became Workgroup Canada, to which I was attached for most of this time.

I never worked on the Mac product. Microsoft Mail for PC Networks, where I did work, _did_ have a Macintosh client, though not a very good one; the nice one that shipped for Windows and OS/2 _almost_ shipped for Macintosh, but got cut for time when 3.0 was so very, very late out the door.

(And even then, it shipped over my dead body. I told GregCr that the MTA wasn’t stable and I meant it and I was right and yelled at him in public when he signed off on it. I was so very right that I got to set the MTBF goals for 3.2. They were… much higher.)

Secondly: Justin’s not just wrong, he’s _very_ wrong. While yes, the MTA and MMTA themselves only talked to Microsoft Mail for PC Network server points, we had _the_ biggest gateway set of anyone out there by far – we talked to _everybody_, including X.25/X.400 and shit nobody remembers like SNADS. And our Mail 3.0 (“It’s Better Than Being Killed With a Forklift”) SMTP gateway was flat out the best in the world amongst PC-LAN email systems. It wasn’t just us saying that either, it was the press. They _couldn’t_ knock it over, and they tried. It was maybe the single most bulletproof product Microsoft shipped in the 90s and I’m proud to have been a part of the team making it that way.

Third: we shipped the last new OS/2 code at Microsoft, specifically in the form of both the client you mentioned and the MMTA for OS/2, first shipped with Mail 3.2 (“And this time, it works!”), then again with 3.2a (“And this time, we mean it!”). That was an actual port of the MTA, a new product for OS/2 specifically, and we shipped it with a copy of Microsoft OS/2 1.31 to run it on. And while we did like to fuck around with team slogans (see in parentheses above – it was a very bitter group in a lot of ways xD ), 3.2 MTA actually was pretty solid – it was reasonable even on DOS. Which gets us to:

Fourth: Mail 3.5 (“Desperately Clinging to Market Share Until Exchange Can Get Its Ship Together”) is hilarious because the “Windows NT” MMTA you’d just installed before making this post? It’s _just_ the 3.2a OS/2 MMTA running under NT’s 16-bit OS/2 subsystem inside an NT services wrapper. With a bunch more bug fixes, of course, mostly but not exclusively by me. It _looks_ like an NT native process, but it’s _not_.

Me, I was mostly working client-side for 3.5 and also kinda trying to find my way out and over to a different group, so I didn’t have much to do with that hilarity. But hey, I mean, it worked fine, so why the hell not ship it? The wrapper gave it better logging and an administration interface so it’s not like you weren’t getting something out of it.

Funny part is, I ended up sticking around until Exchange actually shipped as the last SFS (shared file system) mail developer standing. I’m not saying the two-year transfer-freeze death-march didn’t have anything to do with that fact, but being over in Desperately Clinging to Market Share land honestly wasn’t so bad. Not compared to the rest of that hellscape, anyway. xD

yeah sometimes the easy way out is just to back it up and nuke it. Thankfully it had nothing important but I always make silly passwords of password or save it in a file on the root of the disk to be found later… not that I’ve ever built virtual LAN’s and locked myself out.. . Also watchout for those password expirations!

Solved by recreating the postoffice. Good not to be a production system 🙂

Nice trick hiding the pwd’s inside the case 🙂 But I’m sure the case had some phisical protection right?

Oh yeah, these days I use keepassX. Excelent program.

I know its a PITA to save/backup but as far as I know you’d need something like ‘john the ripper’ source and an API to login and let it run wild to crack the password.

itd been so long since I did an install but I used to write the passwords on a sticker and put them insdide the case of the PDC. these days I use a password manager. I can’t remember them all or have strong/unique so I let the password manager do it for me. 😐

Just doing it for fun in my virtual network 🙂

I remember creating only one user, and that’s the one with the missing password.

Already tried admin/admin but it seems this default user do not exist.

Thanks.

I think there might be some backup user or something… do you have any user accoutns? surprised anyone is or has any MSMail stuff,.