> require  a mainframe  in  the basement.  I realize  this  may be  wishful
> thinking, but as a complete Mac  ignorant I don't understand why I should
> have to rely  on other computers or purchase any  special software beyond
> my mail program (and  whatever is needed to get the mail  data out on the
> network) just so I can have a client which prepares a mail message for me
> and sends it off.
 
That's the gotcha -- there's no standard way to prepare a mail
message on the Mac; everything depends on what mail system you're
using and what connectivity is available to you. If you have
MacTCP and a network available, the programming interface is
different than if you have a serial line. Most Mac mailers don't
have any kind of programmatic script interface, so you end up
doing something like this as a bunch of mouse macros (using
either one of the PD mouse macro recorders, or one of the
commercial ones which actually work reliably), or writing a
Hypercard stack and reinventing the wheel completely. If you
*really* enjoy expending a lot of effort, you could use MPW to
generate a C or Pascal program to do the job, too, but the
learning curve is *amazing*.
 
The most practical configuration is probably a networked Mac with
Hypercard II and the MacTCP extensions for Hypercard. You can
then write a application that composes a SMTP transaction and
then opens a socket to some friendly host SMTP willing to gateway mail
and pumps it out. This is slow, tedious, and crash-ridden;
developing in Hypercard is like writing accounting programs in
FOCAL: you can do it, but the amount of effort is enormous, and
it's really hard to maintain over a long period. The tricky part
is handling the responses coming back on a Mac that isn't running
System 7 (the "multitasking" Mac OS -- hmph!), ie, the million or
two Mac Pluses or Mac SEs that were bought with far too little
RAM or disk space to run Sys7, or just flat out don't have the
right kind of CPU.
 
That's why I suggested something like MacWorkstation; it's
designed to deal with interacting with larger systems, and the
really hard problems can be pushed off to the bigger system,
leaving the Mac to do what it does best: user interface thingies.
You can get MacWorkstation for minimal cost from APDA; I couldn't
find a price in the copy of the docs that I have.
 
I'll try generating a small test case tomorrow; I don't have the
documentation here at home.