Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/11

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Change of screen name
From: Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 08:25:16 -0700
References: <3.0.6.32.20010711104342.007935a0@POP6.sympatico.ca>

> You mean to say that it is not possible to adapt a program such as Eudora
> to AOL?   You can't just plug in the names for AOL's email servers (POP and
> SMTP)?   Or are they doing something proprietary?
> 
> How useless if they are.

It's AOL that's proprietary. Eudora follows the Internet mail standards called
POP3 and SMTP, for reading and sending mail. AOL does not. AOL uses an internal
proprietary protocol that no one has ever managed to reverse-engineer. Eudora
can be used to access any standards-compliant mailbox on any ISP, but AOL does
not implement those. AOL uses PPP and DHCP when you are logged on to AOL, so
you can log on to AOL, hide the window, and then use AOL's internet connection
to do other things.

I've just set things up so that anybody who wants to send to the LUG using
something like Eudora can use mejac.palo-alto.ca.us as an SMTP host without an
account. If you try to send to some other address it will be rejected, but if
you are an AOL user and you have no other account and you want to use, say,
Eudora to send plain-text mail, you can do this.

The problem is likely to be that most people who cannot send plain-text mail
because they are AOL 6 users are probably AOL users because they are not
computer experts, and it takes a certain amount of sophistication to set up
something like Eudora.

In reply to: Message from Dan Cardish <dcardish@sympatico.ca> (Re: [Leica] Change of screen name)