RFC 2162 (rfc2162) - Page 2 of 34

MaXIM-11 - Mapping between X

RFC 2162                        MaXIM-11                    January 1998


Chapter 1 - Introduction

1.1. X.400

   The standard referred shortly into this document as "X.400" relates
   to the ISO/IEC 10021 - CCITT 1984, 1988 and 1992 X.400 Series
   Recommendations covering the Message Oriented Text Interchange
   Service (MOTIS). This document covers the Inter Personal Messaging
   System (IPMS) only.

1.2. Mail-11

   Mail-11, also known as DECnet mail and often improperly referred as
   VMSmail, is the proprietary protocol implemented by Digital Equipment
   Corporation (DEC) to establish a real-time text messaging system
   among systems implementing the DECnet Phase IV and DECnet/OSI (CLNS)
   networking protocols.

1.3. RFC 822 / MIME

   RFC 822 was defined as a standard for personal messaging systems
   within the DARPA Internet and is now diffused on top of many
   different message transfer protocols, like SMTP, UUCP, BITNET, JNT
   Grey Book, CSnet. MIME specifications allows transport of non-textual
   information into RFC 822 messages. Their mapping with X.400 is fully
   described in MIXER and MIME-MHS. In this document we will consider
   their relations with Mail-11, too.

1.4. The user community

   The community using MIME or X.400 messaging system is currently
   growing in the whole world, but there is still a number of very large
   communities using Mail-11 based messaging systems willing to
   communicate easily with X.400 based Message Handling Systems and with
   MIME based systems. Among these large DECnet based networks we can
   include the High Energy Physics network (HEPnet) and the Space
   Physics Analysis Network (SPAN).

   Many other local communities actively use internally Mail-11 mailing
   protocols. As any other "non standard" mail protocol, using non
   standard mapping techniques between Mail-11 and standard mail systems
   can produce unpredictable results.

   For these reasons a set of rules covering conversion between Mail-11
   and X.400 or MIME is described in this document.






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