rfc993.txt

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Network Working Group                              David D. Clark (MIT)
Request for Comments: 993                         Mark L. Lambert (MIT)
Obsoletes:  RFC-984                                       December 1986



        PCMAIL: A Distributed Mail System for Personal Computers



1. Status of this Document

   This document is a discussion of the Pcmail workstation-based distri-
   buted mail system.  It is a revision of the design published in NIC
   RFC-984.  The revision is based on discussion and comment from a
   variety of sources, as well as further research into the design of
   interactive Pcmail clients and the use of client code on machines
   other than IBM PCs.  As this design may change, implementation of
   this document is not advised.  Distribution of this memo is unlimit-
   ed.

2. Introduction

   Pcmail is a distributed mail system providing mail service to an ar-
   bitrary number of users, each of whom owns one or more workstations.
   Pcmail's motivation is to provide very flexible mail service to a
   wide variety of different workstations, ranging in power from small,
   resource-limited machines like IBM PCs to resource-rich (where
   "resources" are primarily processor speed and disk space) machines
   like Suns or Microvaxes.  It attempts to provide limited service to
   resource-limited workstations while still providing full service to
   resource-rich machines.  It is intended to work well with machines
   only infrequently connected to a network as well as machines per-
   manently connected to a network.  It is also designed to offer disk-
   less workstations full mail service.

   The system is divided into two halves.  The first consists of a sin-
   gle entity called the "repository".  The repository is a storage
   center for incoming mail.  Mail for a Pcmail user can arrive exter-
   nally from the Internet or internally from other repository users.
   The repository also maintains a stable copy of each user's mail state
   (this will hereafter be referred to as the user's "global mail
   state").  The repository is therefore typically a computer with a
   large amount of disk storage.

   The second half of Pcmail consists of one or more "clients".  Each
   Pcmail user may have an arbitrary number of clients, typically
   single-user workstations.  The clients provide a user with a friendly
   means of accessing the user's global mail state over a network.  In
   order to make the interaction between the repository and a user's
   clients more efficient, each client maintains a local copy of its



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   user's global mail state, called the "local mail state".  It is as-
   sumed that clients, possibly being small personal computers, may not
   always have access to a network (and therefore to the global mail
   state in the repository).  This means that the local and global mail
   states may not be identical all the time, making synchronization
   between local and global mail states necessary.

   Clients communicate with the repository via the Distributed Mail Sys-
   tem Protocol (DMSP); the specification for this protocol appears in
   appendix A. The repository is therefore a DMSP server in addition to
   a mail end-site and storage facility.  DMSP provides a complete set
   of mail manipulation operations ("send a message", "delete a mes-
   sage", "print a message", etc.).  DMSP also provides special opera-
   tions to allow easy synchronization between a user's global mail
   state and his clients' local mail states.  Particular attention has
   been paid to the way in which DMSP operations act on a user's mail
   state.  All DMSP operations are failure-atomic (that is, they are
   guaranteed either to succeed completely, or leave the user's mail
   state unchanged ).  A client can be abruptly disconnected from the
   repository without leaving inconsistent or damaged mail states.

   Pcmail's design has been directed by the characteristics of currently
   available workstations.  Some workstations are fairly portable, and
   can be packed up and moved in the back seat of an automobile.  A few
   are truly portable--about the size of a briefcase--and battery-
   powered.  Some workstations have constant access to a high-speed
   local-area network; pcmail should allow for "on-line" mail delivery
   for these machines while at the same time providing "batch" mail
   delivery for other workstations that are not always connected to a
   network.  Portable and semi-portable workstations tend to be
   resource-poor.  A typical IBM PC has a small amount (typically less
   than one megabyte) of main memory and little in the way of mass
   storage (floppy-disk drives that can access perhaps 360 kilobytes of
   data).  Pcmail must be able to provide machines like this with ade-
   quate mail service without hampering its performance on more
   resource-rich workstations. Finally, all workstations have some com-
   mon characteristics that Pcmail should take advantage of.  For in-
   stance, workstations are fairly inexpensive compared to the various
   time-shared systems that most people use for mail service.  This
   means that people may own more than one workstation, perhaps putting
   a Microvax in an office and an IBM PC at home.

   Pcmail's design reflects the differing characteristics of the various
   workstations.  Since one person can own several workstations, Pcmail
   allows users multiple access points to their mail state.  Each Pcmail
   user can have several client workstations, each of which can access
   the user's mail by communicating with the repository over a network.
   The clients all maintain local copies of the user's global mail
   state, and synchronize the local and global states using DMSP.

   It is also possible that some workstations will only infrequently be



Clark & Lambert                                                 [Page 2]

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   connected to a network (and thus be able to communicate with the re-
   pository).  The Pcmail design therefore allows two modes of communi-
   cation between repository and client.  "Interactive mode" is used
   when the client is always connected to the network.  Any changes to
   the client's local mail state are immediately also made to the
   repository's global mail state, and any incoming mail is immediately
   transmitted from repository to client.  "Batch mode" is used by
   clients that have infrequent access to the repository.  Users manipu-
   late the client's local mail state, queueing the changes locally.
   When the client is next connected to the repository, the changes are
   executed, and the client's local mail state is synchronized with the
   repository's global mail state.

   Finally, the Pcmail design minimizes the effect of using a resource-
   poor workstation as a client.  Mail messages are split into two
   parts: a "descriptor" and a "body".  The descriptor is a capsule mes-
   sage summary whose length (typically about 100 bytes) is independent
   of the actual message length.  The body is the actual message text,
   including an RFC-822 standard message header.  While the client may
   not have enough storage to hold a complete set of messages, it can
   usually hold a complete set of descriptors, thus providing the user
   with at least a summary of his mail state.  For clients with extreme-
   ly limited resources, Pcmail allows the storage of partial sets of
   descriptors.  Although this means the user does not have a complete
   local mail state, he can at least look at summaries of some messages.
   In the cases where the client cannot immediately store message bo-
   dies, it can always pull them over from the repository as storage be-
   comes available.

   The remainder of this document is broken up into sections discussing
   the following:

      - The repository architecture

      - DMSP, its operations, and motivation for its design

      - The client architecture

      - A typical DMSP session between the repository and a
        client

      - The current Pcmail implementation

3. Repository architecture

   A typical machine running repository code has a relatively powerful
   processor and a large amount of disk storage.  It must also be a per-
   manent network site, for two reasons.  First clients communicate with
   the repository over a network, and rely on the repository's being
   available at any time.  Second, people sending mail to repository
   users rely on the repository's being available to receive mail at any



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RFC 993                                                    December 1986


   time.

   The repository must perform several tasks.  First, and most impor-
   tantly, the repository must efficiently manage a potentially large
   number of users and their mail states.  Mail must be reliably stored
   in a manner that makes it easy for multiple clients to access the
   global mail state and synchronize their local mail states with the
   global state.  Since a large category of electronic mail is
   represented by bulletin boards (bboards), the repository should effi-
   ciently manage bboard mail, using a minimum of storage to store
   bboard messages in a manner that still allows any user subscribing to
   the bboard to read the mail.  Second, the repository must be able to
   communicate efficiently with its clients.  The protocol used to com-
   municate between repository and client must be reliable and must pro-
   vide operations that (1) allow typical mail manipulation, and (2)
   support Pcmail's distributed nature by allowing efficient synchroni-
   zation between local and global mail states.  Third, the repository
   must be able to process mail from sources outside the repository's
   own user community (a primary outside source is the Internet).  In-
   ternet mail will arrive with a NIC RFC-822 standard message header;
   the recipient names in the message must be properly translated from
   the RFC-822 namespace into the repository's namespace.

3.1. Management of user mail state

   Pcmail divides the world into a community of users.  Each user is re-
   ferred to by a user object.  A user object consists of a unique name,
   a password (which the user's clients use to authenticate themselves
   to the repository before manipulating a global mail state), a list of
   "client objects" describing those clients belonging to the user, and
   a list of "mailbox objects".

   A client object consists of a unique name and a status.  A user has
   one client object for every client he owns; a client cannot communi-
   cate with the repository unless it has a corresponding client object
   in a user's client list.  Client objects therefore serve as a means
   of identifying valid clients to the repository.  Client objects also
   allow the repository to manage local and global mail state synchroni-
   zation; the repository associates with every global state change a
   list of client objects corresponding to those clients which have not
   recorded the global change locally.

   A client's status is either "active" or "inactive".  The repository
   defines inactive clients as those clients which have not connected to
   the repository within a set time period (one week in the current re-
   pository implementation).  When an inactive client does connect to
   the repository, the repository notifies the client that it has been
   "reset".  The repository resets a client by marking all messages in
   the user's mail state as having changed since the client last logged
   in.  When the client next synchronizes with the repository, it will
   receive a complete copy of the repository's global mail state.  A



Clark & Lambert                                                 [Page 4]

RFC 993                                                    December 1986


   forced reset is performed on the assumption that enough global state
   changes occur in a week that the client would spend too much time
   performing an ordinary local state-global state synchronization.

   Messages are stored in mailboxes.  Users can have an arbitrary number
   of mailboxes, which serve both to store and to categorize messages.
   A mailbox object both names a mailbox and describes its contents.
   Mailboxes are identified by a unique name; their contents are
   described by three numeric values.  The first is the total number of
   messages in the mailbox, the second is the total number of unseen
   messages (messages that have never been seen by the user via any
   client) in the mailbox, and the third is the mailbox's next available
   message unique identifier (UID).  The above information is stored in
   the mailbox object to allow clients to get a summary of a mailbox's
   contents without having to read all the messages within the mailbox.

   Some mailboxes are special, in that other users may read the messages
   stored in them.  These mailboxes are called "bulletin board mail-
   boxes" or "bboard mailboxes".  The repository uses bboard mailboxes
   to store bboard mail.  Bboard mailboxes differ from ordinary mail-
   boxes in the following ways:

      - Their names are unique across the entire repository;
        for instance, only one bboard mailbox named "sf-lovers"
        may exist in the entire repository community.  This
        does not preclude other users from having an ordinary
        mailbox named "sf-lovers".

      - Subscribers to the bboard are granted read-only access
        to the messages in the bboard mailbox.  The bboard
        mailbox's owner (typically the system manager) has
        read/update/delete access to the mailbox.

   A bboard subscriber keeps track of the messages he has looked at via
   a bboard object.  The bboard object contains the name of the bboard,
   its owner (the user who owns the bboard mailbox where all the mes-
   sages are stored), and the UID of the first message not yet seen by
   the subscriber .