I have a question for VM people with a lot of PC's in their schools.
If this is the wrong list, perhaps you could suggest another.
 
At The George Washington University, Washington, DC, we
have installed a campus net based on AT&T ISN technology. It is just
coming on stream, and nontechnical faculty are starting to sign up
for ports. We use Crosswell mailer and Rice user interface. I'm a
Comp Sci professor and part-time administrator (Asst. to VP) and
don't really mind the CMS interface style. But I'd like to avoid
imposing it on non-tekkies. We site-license YTERM and give it away
to users as a decent terminal emulator for using host on serial
lines. Has good reliable file transfer. So here's the question:
 
Do you know whether anyone has developed a PC-based interface to
CMS mail facilities so that mail could be easily downloaded in
a batch to PC, read there, responses edited and uploaded, etc.
Advantage: you get off the office-to-host line faster and you
don't deal with the CMS user interface with its more/holding junk
and all that.
 
If there is a reasonable commercial product I'd like to hear about
it, but as a University we'd rather have a University-developed
(ie cheap) package, maybe even with source code we could tweak.
To sum up: PCs and Macs over serial lines to IBM 7171 protocol
converter. YTERM is the standard emulator (TinCan on Mac).
I hope someone out there has an idea.