Harald Tveit Alvestrand August 23, 1991 IDEAS FOR PROJECTS WITHIN THE NETF-MHS AREA THAT NORDUNET MAY SPONSOR --------------------------------------------------------------------- The discussions within the NETF-MHS group have given some indications of what issues are pressing in the E-mail world of the Nordunet. It is possible to have funding from Nordunet to do some work to solve some of our problems. One such project is already started: The Nordunet Mail Inspector, Alf Hansen, is starting work now. MAIN PROBLEM AREAS ------------------ - Overall reliability of the mail service. Alf Hansen will study this as Mail Inspector, and make recommendations. - User directories. The X.500 working group is attacking this; we might need to give input to requirements. - Carrying Scandinavian characters in E-mail. The RFC-XXXX work seems to be progressing, albeit slowly. We need to push this work; do we want to prototype it? There is still no clear way forward for Scandinavian characters in X.400; the way in 88 seems to be GeneralText - how do we handle body conversion and body-type-based routings? - User interfaces that use extended character set support. Some people are doing things, but nothing (as far as I know) has been published yet. A prototype will undoubtely find a market. A GOOD prototype will find a larger one. I suggest that we debate the desirability of some projects: NATIONAL CHARACTER SET SUPPORT: SUGGESTIONS FOR PROJECTS -------------------------------------------------------- 1) User interface to RFC-XXXX in the X millieu Work done by UNINETT indicates that within 1-2 man-months, it is possible to convert the existing XMH user interface to show RFC-XXXX mail in a reasonably sensible fashion, including ISO-8859-1 support. Cost : NOK 100.000-150.000 Deliverable: Freely distributable source code for an "extended XMH" Requires : Someone with knowledge of X programming + some mail Reasonably stable RFC-XXXX 2) RFC-XXXX mail interchange with X.400: Study There is yet no clear way to do this, and it is essential for this to be done properly if we want to have ONE service using this stuff. International cooperation is a MUST; estimate a long time and some travel. Cost : NOK 70.000 (guesstimate) Deliverable: A draft RFC that describes the conversion 3) RFC-XXXX mail interchange with X.400: Implementation Based on the PP code, implement a set of filters that is able to translate RFC-XXXX into X.400 body parts and vice versa, according to the output from project 2). Cost : NOK 150.000 (guesstimate) Deliverable: Source for filters, to be included in a future PP release Requires : Reasonable international agreement on point 2. USER DIRECTORY SUPPORT ---------------------- Generally: Does the MHS working group have to do something? I would like to have this working group give ideas to the X.500 group on how E-mail addresses and info about E-mail domains may be sensibly integrated into the Directory. For instance: How to access X.500 to find the person that can tell me why the address someone@some-renamed-domain.some-country does not work any more? RELIABILITY SERVICES -------------------- We need some kind of idea of what reliability the mail system DELIVERS. We usually think of it as "pretty reliable" - but how much? It would be nice to have tools and procedures that allowed us to measure some of that reliability.