Reading & Sending email on Performa 6116 (aka Powermac 6100)

[Dimitris1980]

Hello,

is there a way to read and send emails on my Macintosh Performa 6116CD? I have the last version of Classilla (9.3.3). I use yahoo.gr and gmail.

Computer specs:

PowerPC 60 Mhz

Sonnet G3 500 mhz installed

Mac OS 8.6

136mb ram

Thank you.

 

[Cory5412]

Classic-era email clients no longer support the security standards required by modern email services.

Your best bets are to run a local mail rely or host your email locally so you can choose what security standards to employ. You will not be able to get your yahoo or gmail accounts into a vintage mac email client, or probably even load their web pages.

Somewhat relatedly: 

I'm working on this particular problem as part of the vtools project, (forum thread, web site, patreon) - the intent there is that patreon members at the USD $5 per month support level will get home folders, email, and web hosting. The email addresses on this machine would be [username]@vtools.68kmla.org

The email function isn't available yet, and probably won't be until I can get some time (which, which COVID19 response at my university, and my being important/essential personnel for, might not happen for the near future) to replace my network gateway and migrate the data and users to the new box, after some more testing with aforementioned new box. However, PM me and I can create you an account on the existing machine, if you'd like to poke around at the software on it.

As part of moving to mac os x 10.4 server, there will probably be a webmail component. Sending will require authentication, which does limit things a bit to system 7/8/9-era stuff, a possible compromise is a VPN router that connects vintage Macs directly to the same network as vtools for unauthenticated access to SMTP, I'd have to check into what's reasonable and how to set that up and that would be something that might be available far in the future.

EDIT/Addition: you could forward yuor main email account into a vintage-compatible email server, but to be honest I do not recommend it. No Classic Mac OS email client will display modern email formatting well. At this point (this will change in the future) you pretty much need Mac OS X for that, and even that's kind of up-in-the-air.

 

[CC_333]

I'm also a regular over at the MSFN.org forums (for when I want to play with old MS software;  hope it's OK to mention here), and I've seen stunnel mentioned as a possible solution?

I don't really know what it is, but apparently, it can act as a proxy which will establish a connection to the server in question (such as, say Yahoo mail's POP3 server), then strips the security protocols and forwards the newly unencrypted connection to whatever vintage device you want.

It could probably be configured on a Pi or VM.  Then all one would need is to set up that as a proxy and have their old Macs and PCs connect to the POP3 server via that.

Again, I'm not really sure how it works, so I might be totally missing something.

c

 

[IlikeTech]

It works to an extent, but it doesn't do anything for clients that don't support SMTP authentication, which most vintage clients don't.  Also, stunnel doesn't work well for things like Gmail which require OAUTH2 authentication, instead of just putting in a password.  It might be possible to set up an app password and dial back security settings, but that probably isn't the best idea.