[HECnet] decnet.org

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jul 10, 2012, at 8:47 PM, Peter Coghlan wrote:


On the contrary.   Some of us nerds will be doing a "View Headers" on every
message just to see the circuitous route it took :)


Given this prospect, I thought I'd better set up a MAIL-11 channel in my PMDF
configuration and do some tests to see what the headers look like. While all
the expected rfc822 headers are there on an incoming message, MAIL-11 does
it's bit silently and secretly, leaving little trace of it's leg of the
journey. So, there's not very much there for header-nerds.

If anyone is interested in playing with receiving internet mail via MAIL-11,
despite the lack of exotic headers, let me know and I will add in rules for
the node(s) involved. Outgoing mails to the internet also work (from a VMS
node at least - I haven't tested with any other OSes). PMDF formats the
MAIL-11 From: header so that replying to incoming messages is straightforward.
Composing new outgoing messages is little more fiddly but it does work.

Mail-11 is very simple compared to Internet mail.   It's not store and forward.   Instead, when you ask it to send mail to foo::user, it connects -- right then and there -- to the mail listener at foo:: and asks it if "user" is there.   If yes, it sends the message across, closes the connection, and it's done.

	paul