EDMAS: A locally distributed mail system

The Eden Project is a five-year effort to design, build and test operating system structures for local area networks. A specific goal is to allow users to obtain the advantages of both physical distribution and logical integration. Since Eden is physically distributed, its users can take advantage of personal workstations. Since Eden is logically integrated, system resources can be named and accessed in a location independent way.Edmas, the Eden mail system, was designed to be an early test of Eden's usefulness. This paper describes the design and implementation of Edmas, and presents several of the lessons we have learned about constructing location independent services and about the design of mail systems.