This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in
1995; any technical information is probably outdated.
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Mail systems on AOL
Article: 8405 of alt.hackers From: dedeo@mit.edu (Simon Joseph Dedeo) Newsgroups: alt.hackers Subject: Mail systems on AOL Date: 7 Aug 1995 21:10:22 GMT Organization: Massachvsetts Institvte of Technology Lines: 39 Approved: 950806205316_131964825 Message-ID: 405vfu$krm@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU NNTP-Posting-Host: m11-116-8.mit.edu Followups-To: alt.hackers,poster X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Status: RO
Having read the RFC's for SMTP, I've been led
to believe that sending mail is impossible unless
one can telnet to the SMTP port of the destination
site (usu. 25). How, then, does mail from aol.com
"escape"? Mail *seems* to be coming from something
like "emout04.mail.aol.com", but I'm unable to telnet
to port 25 there. What's up with that? Isn't the
ability to access that port necessary for two
machines to exchange message texts?
And now I'm *really* getting out of my league...
When mail is addressed "jloser@aol.com", the mail
program must access the DNS to locate the address
to telnet to, right? So why does a telnet to aol.com
return a "No address associated with name" error?
-Simon D.
apologies for the foolish statements in the paragraphs above.
And now,
ObDiggingDeepInTheCobwebsOfMyHistoryHack:
-----------------------------------------
Sim Earth might perhaps be one of the few remaining
games with that copy proctection Q/A bull stored
unprotected in a resource file (this is on a mac,
folks). I first located the data ("hidden" in an
obscurely named resource) and tried to just delete
it. No go. Then, I tried replacing all the answers
with "000", but still, no go (some kind of checksum?
or just errors from the bytes getting shifted out
of order.) Finally, I loaded the data into a text
file and printed the bastard out. I eventually went
back to the thing much later and, as an excercise,
located the breakpoint for the "you got the answer
wrong" dialog box (needed to trace back a few jumps
to get there) and flipped a "BNE" a "BEQ" in the code.
Did I mention that Sim Earth really sucks?
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