ETSI TE3 / EWOS EG MHS meeting report

[Urs Eppenberger </c=CH/admd=ARCOM/prmd=SWITCH/o=switch/s=Eppenberger/@wally-gw.udev.cdc.com>]

Dear colleagues,

I've been sent to an ETSI/EWOS meeting to keep an eye on their gatewaying
topic. It came out that they all like RFC1327. Much more time was spent
on MHS-DS issues. I crosspost therefore the report to this list.

Kind regards,

Urs.

===============================================================================

Send-date: Friday, January 28, 1994 at 17:23 GMT+0100
From:     Urs Eppenberger <S=Eppenberger;O=switch;P=SWITCH;A=ARCOM;C=CH>
To:       <S=wg-msg;O=rare;P=surf;A=400net;C=nl>
Subject:  ETSI TE3 / EWOS EG MHS meeting report

Dear colleagues,
I have to pay back the trip to beautiful springlike Nice with a report on
what happened at the ETSI TE3 / EWOS EG MHS meeting.
I was sent there by RARE just for one day to observe the gatewaying
issues topic discussed at one of the five days of the meeting with
the mission to report back to RARE WG-MSG.
I asked the WG-MSG list on what positions I should defend if any. I took
a copy of RFC1327, 1494, 1495, 1496 and the Draft RARE Position on
the RFC822 address attribute in the ORName with me. Armed to the teeth I
was heading off to Nice to face hundreds of ISO heads and Engineers from
Microsoft, Lotus, Novell and Apple!
You'll find a report on what happened attached to this message.

Kind regards,

Urs Eppenberger, SWITCH

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       Meeting Report of the ETSI TE3 / EWOS EG MHS meeting

                  Nice, 24-28 January 1994

       covering topics discussed on Thursday, January 27th

          by Urs Eppenberger, SWITCH, on behalf of RARE

1. General
    
    The opinions expressed in this report are the views of the author,
  who might have got something wrong, comments from the participants
  and from other readers are welcome.
    
    Participants who talked up during the meeting:
      
      B. Ackzell (Chair)
      O. Paridaens, University Libre de Bruxelles
      J. Craigie, JNT
      R. Willmott, Consultant
      C. Baker, DEC
      E. Edem, SITA
    
    15 persons attended the meeting in total. The group itself seemed
  highly motivated, although a little bit lost in the Megapile of
  papers. Discussions on controversial issues were held in a friendly
  way by adding facts until the best solution was found.
    
    This MHS group is reviewing the OSI base standards and makes
  profiles to limit the conformance requirements to a reasonable
  subset (and limit therefore the implementation effort). In the MHS
  area it seems that their work is directly influencing the OSI
  standards, since the editors of the OSI documents show up at EWOS
  meetings too.
    
    There is a large amount of paperwork involved. Some of the
  participants obviously manage to read that stuff. Others get medals
  for less dangerous jobs to your sanity.
    
    Official EWOS MHS group documents have the following numbering
  scheme:   EWOS MHS/yy/nnn
  You can savely ignore anything else.


2. Gateway behaviour
    
    For X.400/Internet Mail gateways RFC1327 is the accepted solution.
  The RFC standardisation mechanism has been explained and comments to
  the documents will be sent to the RFC editors or the discussion
  lists either by the participants directly or as an EWOS statement
  after discussion in the group.
    
    I created a one page paper at the meeting containing the pointers
  to the relevant documents for gatewaying issues and the information
  on where and how to fetch those documents.
    
    It has been stated that the RFC1494 - 1496 series contain bugs and
  fuzzy text. I explained that RFC1327 will be reworked and may even
  include these RFCs and that comments from people who know how to
  formulate unambiguous definitions are heavily welcome.
    
    The topic of gateways to other mail protocols came up:
      
      MSmail:    Microsoft
      CC:Mail:   Lotus
      MHS:       Novell
      QuickMail: CE Software
      PowerTalk: Apple
    
    Jim Craigie has been appointed as editor for a new work item which
  defines the behaviour of such gateways towards X.400, with a special
  focus on mapping of delivery reports, good luck.
    
    Gateways to X.400 and SMTP exist for proprietary protocols:
      
      xxxx-mail  -> gateway1 -> SMTP(1)
      xxxx-mail  -> gateway2 -> X.400 -> RFC1327 -> SMTP(2)
    
    The messages SMTP(1) and SMTP(2) may have only slight resemblance
  left in bad cases. This report does not mention any names. (Just a
  pointer to the first line of the previous table.)


3. MHS use of Directory
    
    The emphasis of the day was on the MHS use of Directory issue.
  There are three known specifications:
      
      ISO:      Editor R. Willmott
      IETF:     Editor S. Kille
      DEC:      ?, maybe the specification can be made public?
    
    The work in ISO and in IETF is not progressing very fast at the
  moment. The work in ISO and EWOS is lead by Robert Willmott. DEC has
  a product to show.
    
    One part of the work is to define all the attributes and object
  classes. The other part of the work is to define where to put the
  real data in the DIT and the algorithms on what to do with the data
  in there.
    
    It is not clear if the routing issues are handled in the MHS group
  or if the working group on management will take this up. This
  concerns me a little bit. All three proposals contain routing
  solutions.
    
    The work for the UAs and Distribution Lists is quite advanced. It
  comes down now to details where a user can have several mailbox
  addresses which have different capabilities and where the sending UA
  will select the most convenient address to send the current message
  to without unnecessarly converting parts of the message. Does the
  DSA need to support such searches for capabilities or does the UA
  fetch all the information and decide itself? The latter has been
  agreed on, I think.
    
    IETF MHS-DS is the only group working on the attributes and object
  classes for gatewaying between RFC822 and X.400 and for routing of
  RFC822 messages. In my view MHS-DS should focus on these issues and
  on feeding back operational experience with DL expansion and routing
  to the ISO standardisation.

    A document discussed the attributes and object classes needed to
  register EDI users in the directory. I'v put myself on the EWOS
  document distribution and I will provide a list of the relevant
  documents to the distribution list once I get the overview.