JPALME@com.qz.se (08/21/89)
I am working on the design of a new X.400 system, and would like to have advice on a detail. Normally, we will of course put human-readable names in the Surname field of O/R-names. But in certain exceptional cases, for example for secret mailboxes, it would be natural for us to take the internal mailbox number, which is an integer, into the Surname field. Would anyone advice against this? If so, we could add a character like M in front of the number. Of course there should not be any risk of mixing up surnames with X.121 addresses, but some systems may have problem with wholly numerical surnames?
Stef@NRTC.NORTHROP.COM (Einar Stefferud) (08/22/89)
Hello Jacob -- et al -- I cannot see any special reason to avoid using digit strings for names, but I can see security reasons for not allowing the use of "internal mailbox numbers" for surnames. In brief, I would suggest not using any simply related numbers from internals of your system as published names of any kind. It just makes breaking in that much easier if someone knows what they are looking for. Better to have all names be mapped by internal tables to their real internal mailboxes. This is especially so for secure mail. Even though you might like assume that you can trust all members of a secure community, you surely know that you cannot trust such assumptions. Best...\Stef
JOHANL@com.qz.se (08/22/89)
Why not use the Numeric form of O/R address that was invented for these kind of things.