> 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.