grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham S Thomas) (06/07/91)
Gradually, X400-style addresses are becoming more common, and gateways between X400 machines and the Internet (or the UK network JANET in my case) are increasing our connectivity. This is posing a few problems for elm users. Mainly, this is due to the predilection for X400 addresses to contain spaces. Elm (or something underlying it) helpfully inserts commas before each space, and no amount of quoting seems to make them go away. A solution, which may only be partial, was found by replacing spaces with hyphens. However, incoming mail, too, causes problems. Elm either appends such messages to the previous message or, if this is the first message, gives an error message saying 'This folder is corrupt - I can't read it.' (The answer to this is to find the original file and edit it to replace spaces with hyphens. I've also found that with mail from some otherwide OK X400 addresses (those with no spaces) other header lines such as 'Subject:' don't get recognised by Elm, even though they are themselves formatted normally - probably some preceding line is messing things up. Anyway, I think I read in the 'frequently asked questions' posting that the spaces problem is known about. Given that X400 is going to become more prevalent, it might be an idea to make fixing this a fairly high priority. Cheers, Graham -- Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK Email: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk Phone: +44 273 678165 Fax: .. 685865
syd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) (06/08/91)
grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham S Thomas) writes: >Gradually, X400-style addresses are becoming more common, and gateways >between X400 machines and the Internet (or the UK network JANET in my >case) are increasing our connectivity. >Anyway, I think I read in the 'frequently asked questions' posting that >the spaces problem is known about. Given that X400 is going to become >more prevalent, it might be an idea to make fixing this a fairly high >priority. Part of the problem, is that Elm is released every 1-2 years, and X.400 wasn't that stable two+ years ago. We did make one change about 4 years ago to accomododate X.400, and they changed the standard and made our change hurt instead of help. Two changes are planned for 2.4 that will effect X.400. The first is the revamping of the alias subsystem. This gets rid of the = in the address vs = delimiter in the alias problem. The second is support for an escape character and for quoted addresses in all of Elm. However, having said that, there are also problems.... 1. While the alias change is complete, the second hasn't been started. This is partially what is holding up the release of 2.4. And, since Elm works totally on volunteer labor, all the X.400 people will be waiting even longer unless volunteers with spare time can be found. 2. Once Elm passes the arguments to the shell, it is at the mercy of the shell scripts users use to retain the arguments as single arguments. This will only really effect those that use shell scripts as front ends to the MTA binary. Elm can do nothing about the second problem. -- ===================================================================== Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP Elm Coordinator Datacomp Systems, Inc. Voice: (215) 947-9900 syd@DSI.COM or dsinc!syd FAX: (215) 938-0235