Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!rayan
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso
From: rayan@cs.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen)
Subject: Re: Questions about X.400
Message-ID: <89Nov22.120823est.2891@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
References: <1987@xyzzy.UUCP> <10100002@WL9.Prime.COM> <8061@ditmela.oz> <3215@convex.UUCP> <46f509bd.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Nov 89 17:08:41 GMT

marc@apollo.HP.COM (Marc [ love them features! ] Gibian) writes:

>There are a number of ways of viewing the x.400 standard.  Most x.400
>products available today treat it simply as an email interchange
>protocol, and use it to let their existing email products connect to
>other x.400 products.  ...
>The other approach to x.400 is to view it as defining not only a protocol
>for interchange of mail, but also a very rich email environment that is
>not supported by any non-x.400 based products.

One of my peeves with X.400 as used in the second way, is the
incredible administrative inconvenience it presents.  Everything is
stored in binary, it can't be edited, diddled, patched, looked at,
grep'ed, etc., none of the normal system tools will work with it. All
is dandy as long as things run smoothly, but if there's ever a problem
the mail/sys-admin will be up a creek.  Note that this is also in a
sense the easier solution for an implementor, i.e. to just make the
transport protocol the storage format.

rayan