Network Working Group Pcmail: a Distributed Mail System for Personal Computers

Pcmail is a distributed mail system that provides mail service to an arbitrary number of users, each of which owns one or more personal computers (PCs). The system is divided into two halves. The first consists of a single entity called the "repository". The repository is a storage center for incoming mail. Mail for a Pcmail user can arrive externally 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.