Posting e-mail from Medley/Lafite to dodo mail service fails with Reject (invalid arguments)

[nbriggs]

Attached is packet trace from NetSpy.
xns.pcap.gz

This is the Medley courier trace output:

NEW.MAILTRANSPORT.SERVER.POLL[] => ((10 10 10 10 10 10 9) (2032#10000.135420.10401#) postman:)

Opened NSMAILER with 2032#10000.135420.10401#40001
NEW.MAILTRANSPORT.BEGIN.POST[(((guest: 1 NON.DELIVERY.ONLY)) 4 188 (0 5)) NIL T ((TRANSPORT.OPTIONS (T
 T))) (SIMPLE (6 26721 30561 27745 3 25701 30208 5 26485 25971 29696)) (51039)] => (ERROR REJECT (
invalidArguments))
Closed with 2032#10000.135420.10401#40001

[devhawala]

argh ... this was to be expected: i implemented the new mail protocol versions used by GlobalView (and apparently by Medley 3.51) with a lot of try-and-error, as i did not have any information (.cr- or .courier-files somewhere in the internet, .pdf at Bitsavers or .mesa-interfaces), so i am happy it does work at all with GlobalView

But the good news is that looking in the lafite directory in the Medley-repo, i found the source-file NEWNSMAIL containing the Courier definitions for the remote procedures used by Lafite. This is better than what i had so far. So i will have a look at it and hopefully correct resp. improve the implementation, although this will take time...

BTW: the source file NSMAIL states to contain the common definitions for NEWNSMAIL and OLDNSMAIL. Just as speculation from the file names, i suppose the OLDNSMAIL should be the implementation/usage of the "old" XNS mail protocols used before incompatible versions were introduced with Services 11.x and GlobalView. These older protocol versions are also supported by Dodo.
But a file OLDNSMAIL is not present in the latife directory, maybe it is still around on some backup or old version of Medley not in the repo?

[nbriggs]

I don't recall there was ever an OLDNSMAIL -- it was just called NSMAIL until there was a NEWNSMAIL.
I'll look and see if I can see any older versions of NSMAIL, though. Pretty unlikely.

Bill van Melle and I wrote (in about 1990) the XNS/SMTP gateway that processed all of Xerox's external mail via PARC's internet connection, using the courier compiler and XNS streams code that ran on SunOS, but I don't know that I have a copy of the courier program definitions from back then.

[nbriggs]

Have you looked at old sources such as you' find at https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/astaff/reference/4.3network/xns/

[nbriggs]

library/lafite/NEWNSMAIL has Courier program MAILTRANSPORT (17) version 5, internal/envos/NSMAIL has MAILTRANSPORT (17) version 4.

[devhawala]

I'am trying to reconstruct the send mail problem. For this i built up a fresh sysout with Lafite from scratch by

• creating new loadups for the current Medley repo (downloaded yesterday night) in the master branch
• running the full.sysout
• doing there an (\NSINIT)and then loading the files LAFITE.LCOM, NSMAIL.LCOM and NEWNSMAIL.LCOM
• saving the sysout

Trying to create a new mail through the Mail>Send mail context menu and then Standard Form or TEdit Report (others don't work), the following debug window opens after login:

Searching a bit further, i found your issue #982 with apparently the same problem, finally describing where the root cause is, but without a solution.

As you posted this Dodo-issue, you must have worked around the above problem: can you give me hints on how to get past this debugger window?

[nbriggs]

If it hasn't been merged yet, start from the medley branch lafite-sendmessage.
The way to get all the right lafite stuff loaded is, in an Interlisp exec

• (SETQ DIRECTORIES (CONS (MEDLEYDIR "library/lafite") DIRECTORIES))
• (FILESLOAD LAFITE NEWNSMAIL)
• (RESTART.ETHER) (probably not necessary, but certainly better than calling (\NSINIT))
• (LAFITEMODE 'NS)
• (LAFITE :ON)

then, as you did before, click on the lafite "Send Message" button, fill in the message, click Deliver. It should ask you to log in at some point, I logged in as guest, guest.

[nbriggs]

See PR Interlisp/medley#997 for the fix for issue Interlisp/medley#982

[devhawala]

i just uploaded a new Dodo version fixing this issue; as always simple download the distribution file dist.zip and replace the file dodoserver-and-nethub.jar in your Dodo-setup with the one from the distribution file.

[nbriggs]

Nice! I have successfully sent a plain-text message and retrieved it. It doesn't manage to send formatted messages (they arrive back without the formatting information). I'll open another issue for that with a packet capture attached.