14 Aug
2024
14 Aug
'24
10:24 p.m.
Kevin Bowling wrote in
<CAK7dMtAH0km=RLqY0Wtuw6R7jXyWg=xQ+SPWcQA-PLLaTZii0w(a)mail.gmail.com>:
|On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 11:59 AM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> wrote:
|> On Wednesday, August 14th, 2024 at 9:45 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> \
|> wrote:
|>> ...
|>> The issue came when people started using the mail system as a programmat\
|>> ic messaging scheme (i.e., fork: some_program | mail user) and other \
|>> programs started to parse the output.
|>> ...
|> Mail as IPC...that's what I'm reading from that anyway...now that's
\
|> an interesting concept. Did that idea ever grow any significant \
|> legs? I can't tell if the general concept is clever or systems abuse, \
|> in those days it seems like it could've gone either way.
|
|I like Clem's answer on mail IPC/RPC.
|
|To add I have heard some stories of NNTP being used once upon a time
|at some service providers the way ansible/mcollective/salt might be
|used to orchestrate UNIX host configurations and application
|deployments. The concept of Control messages is somewhat critical to
|operations, so it's not totally crazy, but isolating article flows
|would give me some heartburn if the thing has privileged system
|access.. would probably want it on a totally distinct
|instance+port+configuration.
|
|Email and Usenet both have some nice properties of implementing a
|"Message Queue" like handling offline hosts when they come back. But
|the complexity of mail and nntp implementations lean more towards
|system abuse IMO.
The IETF will go for SML (structured email)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/sml/about/
which then goes for machine interpretable email message( part)s.
|> I guess it sorta did survive in the form of automated systems today \
|> expecting specially formatted emails to trigger "stuff" to happen.
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)