Mailman

Oh, Mailman has finally turned up! That’s a blast from the long distant past!

When I was at school, a friend and I rewrote it several times and made a BBC Micro version. Lots of extra stuff like encoded mail (simple EOR, but we were the nerd quota so it was good enough), forwarding, group delivery (by form, class, or dormitory), keyword search, mail archival, flags for important/unread/readack, etc etc.

The archival was kind of cool, if I recall, by encoding punctuation into eight bits (beginning %111 then five bits for the character), all of the letters could be reduced to six bits (the highest would be 55, which was 26 upper case, 26 lower case, CR, LF, and Tab) which would be %110111. Then these were written out as a bitstream. Was kind of slow on the Beeb, but given the usual space savings was worth it on a machine with a couple of hundred kilobytes on a floppy.
High bit set was not allowed, big differences between Beeb and RISC OS 2. ;-)

Lost to time, I think the last time I fiddled with it was late 1989? But kind of amusing seeing Mailman pop it’s head over the parapet and say hello all these years later.

[PS anybody who’s read my SIBA stories, yes, it was a bit of a running gag that we were constantly improving (rewriting!) the Econet mail software. And no, I never did make a Kylie filter to toss away such messages!]

simple EOR, but we were the nerd quota so it was good enough

Simple EOR with a very long one-time pad (longer than all the messages you’ll ever send put together) is perfect – provably completely uncrackable, even with a quantum computer. Unlike almost any other type of encryption.

PS anybody who’s read my SIBA stories,

Hmmm, SIBA are you sure you’re not a regular beer drinker?
There is an explanation for the A

Steve – I think you mentioned that before?

Mine is Sunnyvale Independent Broadcasting Association (makes sense in context).

Clive – EOR with the preceeding byte. Dead easy but enough to flummox those who needed to refer to the chart on the wall explaining how to log in…after having already done it for several terms. *I AM BLAH etc etc.

Steve – I think you mentioned that before?

Possibly, the interesting bit is the version they now use has no reason for the “A” – originally Small Independent Brewers Association they now prefer Society of Independent Brewers (probably because quite a few aren’t particularly small.

I think last time I saw you mentioning simple obscuring (it isn’t really encryption in a meaningful sense) I commented on the big endian bit swap used to “encrypt” passwords on the swipe card access system.

EOR with the preceeding byte.

I suspected you weren’t using a one-time pad 8~) never mind a ludicrously long one 8~)