Net.Dreams Remote Mail: From POP to HTML in a Few Clicks
April 19, 1999
By Robert J. Kohlhepp
Getting access to your e-mail while on the road can be a huge hassle. For instance, if you use a POP mail client on a friend's or colleague's computer, you run the risk of leaving sensitive e-mail behind. Now Net.Dreams is providing an alternative. With a complete browser interface, Net.Dreams' Remote Mail offers an HTML-based glimpse into your POP e-mail account, letting you read all your mail from a distance. For sites with Apple Computer MacOS-based Web servers, Remote Mail may be the best solution.
I installed Remote Mail in Network Computing's University of Wisconsin Real-World Labs® on our Apple Server G3 running AppleShare IP 6.1 (ASIP). Remote Mail is written as a Web server plug-in and conforms to the W*API 1.2 standard for MacOS Web servers. Although ASIP is W*API-compliant, Net.Dreams had to make a few tweaks so Remote Mail could work on our server. The vendor has not yet certified Remote Mail on ASIP.
Once the program was running, I used it to check my e-mail at various remote and local sites and, with very few exceptions, I was more than satisfied with the universal interface to my inbox. However, right off the bat, I learned that ASIP is not the best platform for the Remote Mail server. First, ASIP does not support Server Side Includes (SSI), so some of the Remote Mail functionality is disabled. More noticeable is the lack of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support under ASIP; user name and password information traveling over the Internet in clear text is a cause for concern. You should use another Web server, such as StarNine Technologies' WebSTAR, for deploying Remote Mail.
Also, I was somewhat disappointed that I needed to edit a text file to configure the server; a Web interface would have been preferable.
I've Got Mail? Remote Mail doesn't provide any mail store functionality. Instead, it accesses your existing mail using POP3 and reformats it for display in your Web browser. By default, it doesn't delete any mail, so when you return to your regular mail client, you can still access the mail that you checked remotely. Because of its rudimentary--yet solid--implementation, we recommend Remote Mail only for occasional use.
Getting mail was as simple as pointing my Web browser at the Remote Mail server (http:// <server>/RM). From there, I was prompted for the POP server name, login name, password and return address. For security reasons, you can prevent users from setting the return address and restrict them to accessing mail only from your mail server. Using JavaScript (and state files), the frames version remembers the user's information for the next login from that browser.
Mine Eyes Have Seen Out of the box, you have three options for deploying the Remote Mail interface: plain, fancy or frames. Issues with ASIP aside, the bundled interfaces to my mail were very clean and functional. Because they are HTML-based, you can use the predefined formats or create your own interface. For instance, you can add your company logo.
Once logged in, I encountered the usual user and subject inbox listings. By default, there was no date field in the mailbox view, but I secured it with the help of some HTML editing. Browsing through my e-mail, I was pleased to find that I could move to the next new message without returning to the mailbox view. In addition, I was able to delete the current message before moving on. Returning to the mailbox view, I instructed Remote Mail to check for new mail with a single click.
Some of the messages I received claimed to be MIME-encoded. However, they didn't quite meet the MIME specification, and Remote Mail didn't display them very well. Although this is not a Net.Dreams-based problem, the vendor claimed it is planning to make the next release of Remote Mail less rigid about MIME files.
Remote Mail also facilitates MIME attachments. However, because the attachments are decoded at the server, it is wise to restrict the size of the e-mail that Remote Mail processes. I chose to limit each message to 100 KB. Sending an attachment that was under that limit, I downloaded from Remote Mail with a simple mouse click.
When I selected "Compose New Message" or "Reply," another browser window with a form to fill out popped up. As with a typical mail client, I entered information in the to, cc, bcc, subject and body fields. Once I pushed the send button, Mail Agent converted that HTML form into a standard SMTP mail message and sent it out.
Composing and replying to e-mail is supported through Net.Dreams' Mail Agent Lite, which is bundled with Remote Mail. Like Remote Mail, Mail Agent is a plug-in for W*API-compliant Web servers that lets Web users send e-mail via SMTP. Net.Dreams also offers an upgrade path to Mail Agent Pro, which supports PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) signing and encryption.
Unlike Remote Mail's configuration, Mail Agent's is handled via a Web browser. I entered the SMTP host through which mail was to be sent (local AppleShare IP Mail Server), retry delay and the license key. In a matter of minutes, our HTML-to-SMTP gateway was up as well. Via this Web interface, you can glean rudimentary statistics on the number of messages sent, failed and pending. Viewing the log file, I accessed additional information about the messages that had failed.
Send your comments on this article to Robert J. Kohlhepp at rkohlhepp@nwc.com.
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