VMS foreign mail protocol hooks

[George D M Ross]

Yes, I realise that this is not really an "appropriate" newsgroup for this
article, but it's being posted in response to mail I've received from a
number of people asking for clarification of a previous article....

The enquiries centre around what we've done to integrate VMS mail into
our overall networking scenario.  Our VMS machine is attached to two LANs
(one an Ethernet and one of ethernet-type running at 2MHz) and an X25 WAN.

All the networking code is in-house, and dates originally to around 6 years
ago when we were first attached to the University's WAN.  The current link
to the X25 WAN is via a DQS-11 to the CPSE, but as this is not a particularly
well-behaved beast we intend converting to a DMF32 "soon".  This supports
interactive terminal traffic (inbound and outbound) and spooled FTP, the
latter then providing mail transfer and remote printing facilities.  The
2MHz facilities include interactive terminal and file access capabilities,
the latter using the same protocols as were used in our 1976 Interdata-70-based
file server.  On the 10MHz front, we currently support {TCP,UDP}/IP (locally
written), giving only rlogin and tftp at present, and are working on ISO.

Anyway, as I said, mail transfer is by means of spooled FTP.  Inbound mail
is written directly into the users' mail files by the Postman process.
Users send outbound mail using the foreign mail hook in the standard unmodified
VMS V4 MAIL program.  The general idea is that if VMS MAIL sees an address
of the form FRED%"something-or-other" it calls a routine in the shareable
library SYS$SHARE:FRED_MAILSHR, and hands it the "something-or-other" part.
This part, together with the text of the message is handed to the
Postman process by the aforesaid shareable library, and is subsequently
sent out by FTP.  Simple known addresses are send directly, while more
complex addresses are sent to cstvax's sendmail or to 2900-EMAS for relaying.

We are running standard VMS V4 MAIL with no patches whatsoever.  (We did have
to patch V2 and V3 MAIL, replacing the DECnet code.)  The details of the
necessary contents of the shareable library are all in the microfiche -- that's
where we found them.  We may be able to supply UK academic sites with our
shareable library, as an example only and not as a supported product.
-- 
George D M Ross, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland
Phone: +44 31-667 1081 x2730
JANET: gdmr at UK.AC.ed.cstvax  --> ARPA: gdmr at cstvax.ed.AC.UK
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