Re: WP Office SMTP gateway

[davecb@nexus.yorku.ca]

  Erk!
  After a carefull review, we ripped the mail command out
of the wp office-for-vms menu and droped a more usefull
user agent in there in its place.  
  After I reviewed the product, it became obvious that WP Office Mail
is very featurefull, but doesn't do any mail.  It just plunks
messages in other people's accounts for them to read.  This means
that you have to use gateways to get to any machine which doesn't 
share nfs/afs directories with you.  And wpcorp gateways aren't
impressive: the vms one is reputedly the best of a bad lot.

  To summarize: on my wall I have the two-page wp mail poster, with
a yellow sticky on it saying

          This is called
	``The Lie Direct''

--dave

  A bowdlerized version of the review follows:
--------------------
  From my experiments with WordPerfect Office, I have uncovered
what I anticipate will become serious administrative problems.
There is also a missing feature that I consider to be  rather
important.


0)  I'm pleased to see that Office Mail allows you to use Folders,
[but only a very small number --dave]

  (* Using the DecWindows/Motif interface to vmsmail you can view
all your "boxes" and "folders" at once. *)

  Even considering the advantage of not having to learn  another
editor (apart from WP for those who known it), Office mail will
prove (IMHO) to be functionally inferior to  Vms mail.  I had hoped
we could define the WP Text editor as the default editor for Vms
Mail, but that failed.  

1)  Mail forwarding.  Mailing to/from WordPerfect office  works
fine, except in the case where the recipiant has a forward. If the
recipiant has a forward under VMS in the form of either a  DecNet
or Jnet forward, the mail gets to the destination, but is
unrepliable.  ie., the return address is faulty.  

  For example:
	[impossible horrendous botch deleted]
	[the configuration effectively means everyone has a forward,
	 causing all mail to be from
machine::wpgate::machine::wpgate::person@gateway,
	 requiring an amazing rewrite to fix --dave]

2)  Possibly the largest and dealiest of all problems is this: You
can import a Vms Mail Folder into Office, but I see no 
instructions on how to convert Office mail to Vms mail.  The
implications of this include the following:

  - should you ever decide to change products, you lose all your
mail history
  - to save the contents of the files you MUST extract or  forward
EACH file INDIVIDUALLY.  They cannot be extracted from  the files
they are in.  The user does not have access to these files at all,
they are in numbered directories determined by a binary index file. 
The mail messages are encrypted by WordPerfect.  We CANNOT decode
them, Period!  Only the owner, via Office, can extract those files.


**Suggested Solution:
  For the most part, I think Office is a good product.  It 
provides a simple and portable interface to a number of things. I
can copy my Office configuration from a PC and use it on  the Vax. 
It allows for simple menu hierarchies and a few  useful features as
well as relatively simple customization.  

  Office has proven to be a administrative disaster.  As  shipped
(and as currently installed on [machines a,b and c]) it allows any 
user who has access to  that machine to
install with full priviledges any program (s)he  wants and define,
at the system level, any logical (s)he wants. I have fixed this and
tested on [machine c].  I will be fixing on other hosts shortly, now
that I'm sure Office works even  without the security holes that
I've found.  Hopefully, there are no others.

  The security check program was unable to find these holes 
because they appear as harmless data files that are world-
writable.  These files are used by a process with enough  privs to
do anything when it installs images and defines  system-wide
logicals.

  The second major problem is Office's handling of mail.  I  find
this to be unacceptable.  I want the mail to be in each  users
directory.  Under control and credited to that user.   I want to be
able to extract my mail and count on always being  able to yell at
the vendor (Digital) if they mess up my mail. As long as I am using
VMS I should be able to read the same  mail file or have some
simple way of getting from one to the other.  

  My suggestion would be:

0) fix the security holes ASAP.  This requires WP to be  shut down
for about 2 hours.

1) remove Office Mail from the menu and replace it with  Vms Mail. 
This allows users to read mail without having the hassles we are
guarenteed to have with mail forwarding and WP Office Mail. 

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