From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: Sending binary attachments through from X.400 services through internet.
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 17:59:28 GMT

In article <1992Dec11.020307.4912@novatel.cuc.ab.ca> hpeyerl@novatel.cuc.ab.ca (Herb Peyerl) writes:

>What I'm trying to figure out is how best to setup a remote location
>with Email to communicate with our corporate office.  What I've had
>in mind is the use of some X.400 service (attmail, mcimail) with some
>front end package to use on a PC in the remote location. 

AT&T has packages like this for DOS, Windows and the Mac that will
talk to their attmail service and they allow binary attachments.
X.400 conectivity is available but you really don't need it unless
your remote location is on a different service.  You can also connect
to attmail through uucp using your own unix host as the hub for
local traffic.  However, you need a package called pmxpc to talk
between your unix host and your local PC's, and it may only be available
for 3B2's and 386's running SysVr3 and SysVr4.

>There is
>a need to occasionally attach small spreadsheets and documents to
>messages. The remote location would send mail to the X.400 carrier
>through their SMTP gateway and arrive at our site.

The catch is that SMTP gives you a 7-bit path and lots of mailer
software will choke on imbedded nulls in attachments.  This isn't
a problem if you communicate via uucp to attmail or directly to
each other (or from pc's directly to attmail).  The at&t programs
also have an option to use btoa encoding but it's all-or-nothing.
There's no way to specify binary for local, encoding for remote.

>What I'm wondering is how exactly to do this? The other day I
>coincidentally installed a new version of Elm and noticed that there
>was support for something called "MIME".  Intrigued I looked a little
>further and ftp'd the sources to Metamail from thumper.bellcore.com and
>built it.  Now I see that this is "old" technology and everyone else
>has known about this for ages. 

Well, I wouldn't quite say ages - the AT&T programs predate it by several
years and I haven't seen any MIME software for DOS yet that also
provides background communications.

>So, I thought "Well great; the X.400
>service would take binary attachments, uuencode them and put the
>appropriate MIME headers in the body of the message.  On our end we
>would decode them and have our binary attachments.  

In theory this should be fairly easy but I haven't seen any free
software that does it yet, and since all my end points have been
set up to handle pure binary for several years now, I haven't tried
to deal with it myself.  So far it's just been easier to set up
a direct uucp link with everyone who needs attachments or a login
that they can use with the PC software.  If you expect any volume
you may want to do this instead of paying a commercial carrier
for each message.

>I realize that we could just get an X.400 connection at our corporate
>office through our X.25 pad and then just get a mail server package
>for one of our Novell Servers; our Vaxen; or a workstation.  However,
>this doesn't solve the problem of inter-office email with binary
>attachments.  I'm thinking that if we can get the SMTP solution to
>function then the rest of our problems would also be solve.

We're using AT&T/NCR's StarGroup software which accomodates the
Starmail package which, like the software mentioned above uses
a unix server's mail as the native transport.   Starmail is supposed
to run on novell lans also, but you need yet-another-transport program
on a unix hub to talk to a dos based lan unless you link them through
the attmail service.  I'm sure better solutions are on the way... 

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us