martin@hq.af.mil (Gregory.J.Martin) (09/01/90)
Okay, here's one to wet your whistle. Our VINES network is connected to a broadband network which connects to many organizations using many E-Mail formats. We're trying to resolve an e-mail reliability problem which requires political agreements with alot of military type folks (spot my organization name!). I need two types of help. 1. If you've ever worked at such a problem tell me how you approached it. 2. A much more specific question. Does anyone know when VINES will offer an X.400 compliant mail service. I know there are gateways available today-I just like to get a feel for when they'll be doing x.400 as part of there protocols. If you'd like the details, read on. We're part of a homogenous broadband where each baseband is owned by a separate Air Force or DoD agency. There are Xerox, IBM, Sun, AT&T, Banyan, DEC, etc hosts. We currently use RFC822 compliant services to provide e-mail between the hosts. The big problem arises when Colonel X wants to send e-mail to Mr Z. Col X wants to type Mr Z in his TO: field and get the mail delivered. Well, that's okay if the system administrator has all day to spend keeping his alias file full with the names of the thousands of names and userids and host ids on all these systems, but he's got other work to do. We're considering an E-Mail clearinghouse which would allow users to send all E-mail to one host and have the host parse the name and try to find a real address. Has anyone tried to implement such a beast? What about standard userids. Do you think a standard naming convention (such as last name, 1st initial, middle initial) are worth implementing so users can easily come up with a userid? Thanks for you help...Greg Martin@hq.af.mil