If your system has PMDF-X400 or PMDF-MB400 installed, then you may be able to use it to send mail to X.400 subscribers on other systems. However, be warned that the information provided here is very general. In practice, the required information which you must supply to properly identify an X.400 addressee varies considerably from site to site as well as between X.400 service providers. You may find that you need very specific information in order to successfully address a message to a given X.400 subscriber (e.g., what PRMD and ADMD to specify, whether or not initials are required, whether or not an organizational unit must be specified, etc.).
For sending mail to local X.400 users, you should consult your system manager or postmaster to determine the precise addressing conventions which you should use.
Now, PMDF X.400 addresses have the format
IN%"'/attribute1=value1/attribute2=value2/.../'@X400-gateway-domain"where
X400-gateway-domain is a domain name which
was selected by your system manager when PMDF-X400 was installed.
attribute1, attribute2, ...
are any of the attribute names listed in Table 1-3 and
value1, value2, ... are
allowed values for the corresponding attributes. Consult your system
manager for the proper domain name to use for
X400-gateway-domain.
| PMDF-X400 name | X.400 attribute |
|---|---|
| C | Country |
| ADMD | Administrative Domain |
| PRMD | Private Domain |
| O | Organization |
| OU | Organizational Unit (up to four of these fields are allowed) |
| S | Surname |
| G | Givenname |
| I | Initials |
| DD.xx | Domain Defined Attribute "xx" |
Now, assuming that the X400-gateway-domain domain
name is x400.acme.com, then a sample X.400 address as entered in VMS
MAIL might be
IN%"'/g=George/s=Jetson/o=Spacely Sprockets/'@x400.acme.com"This address specifies the recipient George Jetson of Spacely Sprockets. If you are using PMDF MAIL, then instead specify this address as
"/g=George/s=Jetson/o=Spacely Sprockets/"@x400.acme.comThe only difference between these two addresses is that the IN%" " wrapper has been removed and the interior single quotes, ', changed to double quotes, ".
If any spaces or other special characters from the list of RFC 822 "specials" characters
( ) < > @ , ; : \ " . [ ]appear amongst the attributes or values in the X.400 ORname portion of the address (the local-part of the address), then the entire local-part of the address must be enclosed in quotes,
". For
instance, in the example above the space in Spacely
Sprockets has caused the entire local-part to require quoting.
An additional quoting is required when any of the characters =, $, or / appear in an attribute value. These characters must be quoted by prefixing each occurrence with a dollar sign, $. For instance, if "erik mainz a/s" is to be specified with an Organization attribute, then it must be specified as
/o=erik mainz a$/sso that the / in a/s is not confused with the normal use of / as an attribute separator.
Note also that X.400 is limited in the characters that are allowed in
attribute values to the characters defined as members of the printable
string set. Characters that are used in RFC 822 (Internet) addresses
but not allowed by X.400 are specified by multi-character substitutions
in accordance with RFC 2156. These are particularly useful when X.400
originators need to specify a complete RFC 822 address in a
DD.RFC-822 domain-defined attribute. The substitutions are
listed in Table 1-4 .
| Desired character | X.400 multi-character |
|---|---|
| @ | (a) |
| % | (p) |
| ! | (b) |
| " | (q) |
| _ | (u) |
| ( | (l) |
| ) | (r) |
mrocheck@foobar.com using the DD.RFC-822 attribute, the
"@" must be specified as "(a)":
DD.RFC-822 = mrochek(a)foobar.com
Note:
Since the ( and ) characters delimit comments in RFC 822 addresses, the use of printable string substitutions imposes the additional requirement that any address containing them must be enclosed in double-quotes. For example:"/dd.rfc-822=astro(a)pound.com/prmd=Gwy/admd=In/c=us/"@x400.acme.comHere, the double quotes are required to prevent the (a) from being discarded by the RFC 822 address processor through which this X.400 address is sent.