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Path: utzoo!watmath!deepthot!julian
From: julian@deepthot.UUCP (Julian Davies)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Anyone know about X.400?
Message-ID: <256@deepthot.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 26-Mar-84 19:47:01 EST
Article-I.D.: deepthot.256
Posted: Mon Mar 26 19:47:01 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Mar-84 00:27:48 EST
References: <212@hocsd.UUCP>
Organization: UWO CS, London Canada
Lines: 38

Re relationship between X.4xx (CCITT Message Handling facility)
recommendations and ARPAnet conventions.  Someone else ought to
be answering these questions (someone who's actually on the CCITT
study group, that is)!  There is NO connection between the X.4xx
recommendations and the ARPAnet conventions.  Actually, I don't
think NBS is directly involved in CCITT --they will be a member of
ISO which is coordinating, and NBS staff are active in IFIP WG6.5
(Debbie Deutsch among others).

NBS did draw up a draft Federal Info Processing Std on interconnection
of message systems, which was influenced by a list of necessary
message header fields derived from ARPA experience.  See Deutsch's
paper in the book "Computer Message Systems" (north-holland) which is
a report of the last IFIP WG6.5 Conference.  The details of the NBS
encoding scheme got changed in the CCITT version.  The encoding system
is machine oriented, not human-oriented.   The "Distributed
systems research group" at UBC (University of British Columbia) is
developing an implementation of a message system using the CCITT
recommendations, and I believe it includes gatewaying between UUCP
mail and the new protocols, but don't know the details.  It isn't due
for public release for a while so far as I know.  Building a gateway
between a CCITT system and ARPA style protoclols should be a finite
task, since the same kind of information is needed on both sides;
representations are different.  Addressing and Naming will be a
problem for quite some time to come.  (Perhaps UBC will comment?)

Note that the CCITT *recommendations* are just that.  No coercion.
Market forces will tend to make implementations that conform to them
attractive, especially outside North America (maybe).  Does anyone
know what NBS is doing with the proposed FIPS in this area, which is
now seen to be incompatible?

Anyone who is really interested in this area should buy a plane ticket
and get registered for the next IFIP WG6.5 Conference in Nottingham,
UK, the first few days of May 1984.  A notice about it was sent out in
net.mail.something a few weeks ago.  A book of the proceedings will
be published in due course (by North-Holland, who have a monopoly on
IFIP publishing so far as I can see).