And quite the topic it is!

Changing the Topic to something real now. I rather like the new Microsoft Mail. I have been a diehard Pegasus user for a long time but the lack of commitment they have displayed to a full Win95 release sorta put me off. I had problems with attachments out of different directories. Did anyone else experience this? Anyway, after about 3 minutes with the Miocrosoft Internet mail, Pegasus was in the recycle bin and shortly went from there to the void. It works very smart. I am, like Stroud, pleasantly surpris d by Microsoft's effort. I will be even more pleased with multiple address books and multiple possible signatures. I realize you can have multiple sigs now; but not as nicely implemented as in Pegasus. Other than that, its great. I look forward to future versions.

Clark, you may want to check out the email sections of our Apps conference at www.spring.com. We have quite a few topics on different email programs and full reviews of email programs from Forrest Stroud.

Derailing the discussion, for testing porpoises: Now that we have switched from SunOS4.1.4 so Solaris 2.5, we should move ahead quicvkly with getting Yapp running on our systerm. Maybe we will use Frames, or maybe not....

We have Solaris 2.5 also, running on a Sparc Ten at hot.spring.com.

Can anyone tell me what the heck a gopher is ? I see software for it , I see gopher sites mentioned as part of a URL address , but what the heck is it ?

A gopher is becoming an antiquated form of providing information. I've used them but I'd be hard pressed to give you a definition. We had one for a while on the Spring but hardly anyone ever used it. I'll try and dig up a definition. Welcome to the yapp conference by the way, have you been to our conferences at http://www.spring.com ?

Maybe this will help more: How does WWW compare to gopher and WAIS? While all three of these information presentation systems are client-server based, they differ in terms of their model of data. In gopher, data is either a menu, a document, an index or a telnet connection. In WAIS, everything is an index and everything that is returned from the index is a document. In WWW, everything is a (possibly) hypertext document which may be searchable. In practice, this means that WWW can represent the gopher (a menu is a list of links, a gopher document is a hypertext document without links, searches are the same, telnet sessions are the same) and WAIS (a WAIS index is a searchable page, returning a do cument with no links) data models as well as providing extra functionality. World Wide Web usage grew far beyond Gopher usage in the last few months, according to the statistics-keepers of the Internet backbone. (Of course, World Wide Web browsers can also access Gopher servers, which inflates the numbers for the latter.) WWW has long since reached critical mass, with new commercial and noncommercial sites appearing daily. from http://www.boutell.com/faq/gwais.htm

And if you want the full lowdown: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/gopher-faq/faq.html