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From: sample@ubc-ean.UUCP (Rick Sample)
Newsgroups: net.mail,net.internat
Subject: Re: Domains: Multiple names OK? (really, decommissioning of nicknames)
Message-ID: <1466@ubc-ean.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Sep-86 01:47:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-ean.1466
Posted: Fri Sep 12 01:47:50 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Sep-86 22:46:17 EDT
References: <566@mecc.UUCP> <2502@cbosgd.UUCP> <3920@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Reply-To: sample@ubc-ean.UUCP (Rick Sample)
Organization: UBC Distributed Systems Research Group, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 27
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In article <2530@cbosgd.UUCP> mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) writes:
>This comes as a surprise to me, having been told by Europeans that
>EAN is not really very X.400.  (It's an ARPA style domain mail
>system with an X.400 MTA interface.)

EAN is completely X.400.  The limitation in the first distribution of
EAN is that it cannot generate or handle arbitrary X.400 addresses,
it uses an EAN specific subset.  Although the user interface appears
ARPA-like, the internals have nothing to do with any ARPA protocols.

>                                      Now I happen to LIKE ARPA-style
>domain systems, but the last I heard, EAN-style systems would have
>great difficulty sending mail to a true X.400 spirit system with
>arbitary attributes.  (Perhaps EAN has fixed this since I heard.)

The first distribution did indeed have these problems, although they
were overcome by construction of gateways that performed address
translations.  This method was employed over a year ago to interconnect
with an experimental X.400 system at KDD, Japan.  Note that almost all
X.400 implementations use only a subset of the X.400 addressing attributes.

The next disribution of EAN will be able to accept and generate arbitrary 
X.400 addresses, using an string encoding based on Steve Kille's RFC.  
The current development version of EAN has exchanged messages with 
other X.400 implementations which used different addressing schemes.

Rick Sample, University of British Columbia