[comp.sys.mac.misc] X.400 on the Macintosh

aruigrok@bnr.ca (Adrian C Ruigrok) (07/05/90)

Has anybody given any consideration to making the macintosh a full player 
in the X.400 mail world?  We are putting in an X.400 mail system at 
Bell-Northern Research, and everyone is threatening to turn the Macintosh 
into a dumb terminal to a User Agent on a Unix box because there is no 
commercially available User Agent for the Macintosh.

The closest we have come is an X.400 Gateway from Touch that will let you 
use Quickmail.  However, (though I have not checked) I assume that will 
only give us whatever subset of X.400 Quickmail provides.  This will not 
give us access to our X.500 for name lookup and validation.

This leads to the next question.  Some work is being done on X.500, again 
in Unix, but is anybody considering a Macintosh Directory User Agent?  I 
have seen a cool Hypercard stack that let you log onto a Unix box and use 
X.500 via the remote Directory User Agent, on the Unix box, but that is 
reducing the Macintosh to a pretty terminal again.  

If this is all ahead of its time that is fine.  We will have to break the 
ground ourselves.  But if someone has done some work in this area already 
I would love to hear about it.  

As always, I will post a summary if there is any interest.  I have to 
admit I have never seen any talk of OSI for the Macintosh but I am always 
hopeful that I am not alone in my interests!

Thanks
Adrian
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Adrian C Ruigrok
Bell-Northern Research
Open Systems Integration