> You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing.

It's entirely possible that it wasn't part of Netware, I don't remember the hard details as it was a very long time ago. However, it worked in DOS text-mode (we rarely ran Windows), and my impression was that Microsoft didn't do much network-aware stuff until well into Windows. So that's why I thought of it as a Novell thing rather than a Microsoft thing.

> the username included in the message is not authenticated at all

Oh.... oh dear.