RFC 2162 (rfc2162) - Page 2 of 34
MaXIM-11 - Mapping between X
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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. Allocchio Experimental
