The  new  MAIL  GATEWAY  of  the  LNF

Versione italiana 

Index:

Introduction

This Section summarizes a document distributed during a meeting of the INFN National Computing Committe held in October 1996 and edited by:

C. Allocchio, L. dell'Agnello, G. Vitafinzi

THE MIGRATION OF THE MAILING SYSTEM MIGRATION OF THE INFN

The internal mail system of the INFN has born based till now on a double parallel transport backbone, namely SMTP and X.400.

The continuous decrease of the internal X.400 traffic, combined to the considerable increase of the SMTP mail traffic (mainly in multimedia format), makes believe that the time to restructure this system has arrived. In particular we also take in account other needs, external to mailing, system like, for example, the evolution of the available hardware (now definitively multivendor and, in the case of VMS systems, now almost completely on AXP machines), the always minor importance of the DECnet transport at wide area level and the spreading of the Unix systems with a density now comparable with the OpenVMS ones. Furthermore one should also take into account the great number of Personal Computers (DOS, Windows,Windows NT, Mac OS,...) existing on the network.

Therefore we will proceed with a series of actions, that will bring in a short time to the substitution of the old mailing system of INFN.

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Technical Aspects

          "X.400-address"@infngw.infn.it
    In the meantime the central INFNGW gateway will keep its present version and will continue to allow links to the rest of the pure X.400 world, including all most used commercial services (Master400, PtPostel, INTESA, IBM400, Gold400, BT, ATLAS, DBP, UMI,...).

    On the same node the RFC1006 transport will be installed and configured to replace the X.25 transport over EUROPAnet and to reduce the use of Itapac use only as an emergency backup in the case of IP malfunction.

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    MUA (Mail User Agent)

    From the point of view of the user, the reception of native MIME format messages (multimedial) has now become possible, provided he use the right mail user agent (MUA). In our opinion, the most qualified products (besides those advised by CERN) are:
    1. PINE for alphanumeric terminals (Unix)
    2. Netscape Mail (Mozilla) (Unix, Windows, Mac...)
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    Further developments

    The use of mail clients supporting the IMAP4 protocol, their advantages and disadvantages, is under test and further information will be released at INFN level.

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    Following phase

    The network mail transport internal to the INFN, will  become completely TCP/IP based. The DECnet Plus will remain only on the central gateway and on its backup to implement RFC1006 (X.400 over IP transport) towards the remaining X.400 world; DECnet Plus works only locally and not as a wide area transport for the mails. The X.25 protocol (Itapac) remains only on the central gateway in the case of an IP network failure. An evaluation of the pure X.400 mail traffic will tale place to verify the need need to mantein the gateway operational. A possible development of the gateway could be its use for the PtPostel service, otherwise get unreachable.

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Specific Configuration of the LNF

The Berkeley Sendmail version 8.11.4 has been installed on a Linux System of the LNF. The name of the machine is: This machine work as a mail relay (or mail gateway) for the LAN of the LNF; all the mails incoming from outside of the LNF and sent to the generic user of the domain lnf.infn.it, pass through this node, that forwards them to the actual machine containing the recipient's mailbox.

The same software has been installed, as client version, on the Unix HP and Digital machines listed in the following table. In the same table, configured as clients of the mail gateway, are also listed:


 

Unix Systems
uxcalc
axcalc
dxcalc
dxcf01
hpcf08
1) Machines to select for the mailbox (uxcalc for Unix)
2) Main machines with interactive access opened to all users of the LNF
3) Machines with batch and interactive access reserved to groups

All belong to the domain lnf.infn.it

Note that uxcalc is an alias name that point to machines managed by the Computing Service where the Unix  mailboxes reside.

In such configuration, a mail, sent from one of these machines, will be forwarded to the mail gateway that will change (if required) the address of the sender and then will send the mail to the recipient.

The users will see any incoming mail address with RFC822 format. As already indicated, the outgoing address is strongly advised to be like the following:

Now all the users can receive the mails with their present addresses (bound to the username), that is: but, as soon as users will register their own name and surname in the database of the mail gateway, the mails will seem as sent by: and the mails can be received with the following destination addresses: To register his own name and surname as mail address of the LNF, the user can use the special registration form that allows him to link his own name and surname to the username and also to specify the machine of the LAN where he wants his mailbox.

Any mailbox machine has to support necessarily the SMTP protocol and, in the case that the user wants to use the address conversion through the aliases defined in the users' database, it will have to be necessarily configured to refer to the mail gateway both for the incoming and the outgoing mails. In simple words, mailbox machine can be any workstation (Unix), but not a PC or a Macintosh.

For owners of PCs or MACs, the solution is to have in any case an account on a main machine managed by the Computing Service and only define the own mailbox on that machine and finally use the IMAP protocol (supported by applications like EUDORA, NETSCAPE/Mozilla, etc.) to download mails onto their PCs or MACs.

The users having the same username (or more usernames) in various environment, will have to define their own forward to the address

on all those and only on those environments not expected to contain their own mailbox.

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User's Guide

Registration form

The first thing that the LNF user has to do, is to register himself in the new database to define his own mail address and the mailbox. To do this he needs to fill in the proper www form. In the form he needs to input the following data:
  1. Name and Surname
  2. Username
  3. Machine where he wish to have the mailbox
1) The Name and Surname are those of the registry office. The procedure will collapse possible blank spaces and apostrophes in any composite name and/or surname.

2) The Username must be the one of the machine where the user wish to receive his mails. The Username must exist on the specified Machine.

3) The Machine of the mailbox is the machine where the user wants to read his own mails. The users of the Computing Service can actually define uxcalc for the mails on Unix. The generic users of the LAN that wish to have their mailbox on private nodes (not managed by the Computing Service), can define only machines able to accept mails using the SMTP protocol, not included in the previous table, and however belonging to the IP domain lnf.infn.it.

Finally the procedure will display to the user the inserted data and his own mail address. Remember that in the address the uppercase and lowercase characters are equivalent, then their use has pure aesthetic nature.

Note that the user who requires a database change, is notified via mail just after having filled the registration form and that the Computing Service will do a consistency check of the inserted data before making them operative.
The user can check the current definition of the own username in the mailbox database, using the command

available on all the Computing Service machines both Unix and OpenVMS.

WARNING: The registration through the WWW form in the mailserver database, necessarily involves the change of the "From:" field in the outgoing mails, from the actual "username@lnf.infn.it" to the "Name.Surname@lnf.infn.it".
This fact can produce an inconvenience to all users that send mails to closed distribution lists that authenticate the mail on the basis of the "From:" field. In other words those users can usually receive mails from those distribution lists, but cannot send to the list untill the list manager does not replace their old mail address with the new one.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

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Mailing in the Unix environment

For the users that define their own mailbox in the Unix environment, the most suitable applications to send and receive multimedial mail (MIME format) are: The addressing type to use is only the SMTP one: examples: The automatic mail forwarding can be set writing the address in a file named "$home/.forward".

Note: for AFS client systems (all the unix systems managed by the Computing Service), you have to follow the instructions described in the URL:
http://www.lnf.infn.it/computing/afs/migration.html

Example of file "$home/.forward":

The users that define their own mailbox in an environment different from the Unix one, will have to define the mail forwarding in the file "$home/.forward" as: Back to the index

Mailing in the PC or MAC environment

The users that wants to read their own mails from a PC or MAC, have to use IMAP protocol and configure the Mail User Agent.
Further information in:

http://www.lnf.infn.it/computing/doc/netinfo.html     (general info)

http://www.lnf.infn.it/computing/mailing/imap/          (IMAP configuration for netscape mozilla)
 

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[ LNF | Computing | Networking ] 

 
Authors:
Sandro Angius Claudio Soprano      Massimo Pistoni
mailto:Sandro.Angius@lnf.infn.it mailto:Claudio.Soprano@lnf.infn.it      mailto:Massimo.Pistoni@lnf.infn.it

Last Update:  Jul 24, 2001