PMDF-MB400 is a gateway between PMDF and Compaq's MAILbus 400 family of products. PMDF-MB400 uses the Message Transfer (MT) and Object Model (OM) interface components of the X.400 API Association (XAPI) interface into MAILbus 400. A PMDF-MB400 gateway is defined to MAILbus 400 as an XAPI Agent. PMDF-MB400 supports Interpersonal Messaging (IM 84 and 88) and Message Handling (MH 84 and 88) conforming to the 1984 and 1988 X.400 recommendations.

The PMDF-MB400 gateway provides address and message conversion between the X.400 P1/P2/P22 representation and the RFC 822 and MIME (RFCs 2045--2049, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) message representation used by PMDF. MIME and X.400 features such as multiple bodyparts and non-text bodyparts (e.g., file attachments) are supported.

PMDF with PMDF-MB400 provides X.400 gateway services to any remote mail system that has connectivity to PMDF. For example, PC LAN or TCP/IP hosts that can interchange messages with PMDF can make full use of a PMDF-MB400 gateway in order to interchange messages with X.400 mail users. Viewed from the X.400 side, PMDF and PMDF-MB400 provide MIME-MHS gateway capabilities from X.400 to any mail system with connectivity to PMDF.

PMDF-MB400 uses a rule-based algorithmic process to convert between RFC 822 and X.400 addresses. Because this process is not implemented as a simple table-lookup, as are some other X.400 gateway implementations, PMDF-MB400 does not require that users of the gateway be registered in order to use the gateway. If restricted access to the gateway needs to be enforced, PMDF itself provides generalized access restrictions which can be applied to PMDF-MB400 channels.

Default rules for address conversion are provided which conform to RFC 2156. Other types of conversion can be implemented, if desired, by changing or adding to the rules in the address conversion databases.

This chapter describes the structure and configuration of PMDF-MB400. Before configuring PMDF-MB400, PMDF must first be installed with the PMDF-MB400 option selected; the PMDF installation will then also install PMDF-MB400. If you had already installed PMDF without the optional PMDF-MB400 support and now wish to add PMDF-MB400, then you need to reinstall PMDF and select the PMDF-MB400 option during the reinstallation. Note that installation of PMDF-MB400, or indeed reinstallation of PMDF and all related option products, will not adversely affect your existing configuration; you will not need to reconfigure PMDF itself.