Xref: utzoo comp.misc:3196 comp.std.misc:58 comp.mail.misc:1207
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mit-eddie!apollo!marc
From: marc@apollo.COM (Marc Gibian)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.std.misc,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Standardizing Email?
Message-ID: <3e0ccda9.166d8@apollo.COM>
Date: 24 Aug 88 13:15:00 GMT
References: <788@vsi.UUCP> <79700010@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <304@pvab.UUCP> <26196@think.UUCP> <3714@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: marc@apollo.UUCP (Marc Gibian)
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 53

In article <3714@polya.Stanford.EDU> andy@cayuga.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman) writes:
>In article <26196@think.UUCP> barmar@kulla.think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>>In article <304@pvab.UUCP> robert@pvab.UUCP (Robert Claeson) writes:
>>>What does an X.400 address look like?
>>

<a number of comments and questions regarding addresses in X.400>

The addresses to be used in delivering an X.400 letter are specified
as X.400 Originator/Recipient names, commonly refered to as O/R names.
The available variants (according to my red book, granted a bit out
of date) are:

variant 1:
                Country name
                Administration domain name
                [Private domain name]
                [Personal name]
                [Organization Name]
                [Organizational Unit Names]
                [Domain-defined attributes]

Note - at least one of private domain name, personal name, organization name and 
organizational names must be selected.

variant 2
                Country name
                Administration domain name
                UA unique numeric identifier
                [Domain-defined attributes]

variant 3
                Country name
                Administration domain name
                X.121 address
                [Domain-defined attributes]

I will not expand upon the individual fields, please look at your X.400 standard to
find that information.

I would observe that a lot of the details are left to the implementation of the
user agent (UA), though if I remember properly everything is intended to be entered
as pretty flexible text.

One other note on this topic.  There is a related standard, X.500, which addresses
networked directory services.  This is far beyond what the current RFC based mail
systems can do as this provides a way to complete addresses, find addresses, and
so on.  The identification scheme described by the standard provides a way of
generating a unique address for every item of data in the world, including
people.

Marc S. Gibian
email:  marc@apollo.com