TITLE
    X.400 Solutions for the Macintosh
Article ID:
Created:
Modified: 		5749
6/17/90
1/19/93
TOPIC



    Article Change History
    ----------------------
    1/19/93 - UPDATED
    * Touch Communications, Inc. now SAIC.
    6/8/1990 - REVIEWED
    * For accuracy.


    My company has a growing number of customers in Europe, and we need to
    communicate (E-mail) with them via the Macintosh. Our corporate backbone
    already has an X.400 gateway, but we need a front-end, much like AppleLink, to
    facilitate national and international communication. Is there such an
    application?

DISCUSSION

    Apple used RetixMail for a Macintosh demonstration in Hanover.

    Apple Europe demonstrated the WOPODA developer tool at the last Hanover fair.
    It is based on the ODA (Office Document Architecture) standard and lets you do
    conversions from any word processor to ODIF (Office Document Interchange
    Format), a standardized format for documents. We needed an X.400 product to
    send the ODIF documents to the other vendors (including DEC, IBM, Sun, HP, and
    so on) and used RetixMail for the Macintosh. Here is some information about
    Apple's forthcoming solution:

    The Apple X.400 product is an X.400-compliant MTA (Message Transfer Agent) that
    runs on any modular Macintosh under System 7. It includes the seven layers of
    the OSI model. It works either over X.25 (on top of the MacX25 product) or
    over 802.3 (this is the most used link in the U.S.). It lets Macintosh users
    gain access to public X.400 networks or to connect to their private X.400
    backbone.

    Note that APDA is the distributor for the Apple X.400 product to give
    developers the opportunity to write client software for it.

    There are two existing X.400 solutions for the Macintosh, to our knowledge,
    from Retix and SAIC (formerly Touch Communications). They are similar in their
    design: the MTA (Message Transfer Agent = the X.400 server) runs on a PC and
    the UAs (User Agents = the clients) run on a Macintosh. So, you need one PC,
    at least, to access the X.400 backbone.

    - Retix did a PC-based MTA and created two versions of their own client:
    RetixMail for the PC and RetixMail for the Macintosh. You have to buy both
    client and server software to use it.

    - Touch took another approach: they did an X.400 gateway for Microsoft Mail and
    one for QuickMail. Macintosh users who use Microsoft Mail or QuickMail today
    can keep their existing client software. They just have to buy a PC with Touch
    X.400 software plus either the Microsoft Mail gateway or the QuickMail gateway
    to connect to the X.400 backbone.

    To locate a vendor's address and phone numbers, use the vendor name as a search
    string.



Document Information
Product Area: Communications-Networking
Category: MacX25
Sub Category: General Topics
Keywords:

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