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Section 2.2 - X.400 e-mail

All employees of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ) have an X.400 address, only a few have an Internet address. This is a temporary situation, by the way: as per 1 januari 1996 all EZ employees will have an Internet address. When this form is known, it will be described here. It will probably be like this: separate all initials with a dot, append surname and "@minez.nl". Thus, it will be comparable with the RGD scheme.
Example: G.T.Lith@minez.nl

Above we described the X.400 address to which an EZ collegue (or anybody else with an X.400-only connectivity) can send an e-mail, if he or she wants to communicate with an RGD collegue.
In this paragraph we will describe how an RGD employee can send e-mail to somebody who has only X.400 connectivity (which used to be the case for most EZ collegues). The trick is that the X.400 address is "wrapped in" and "converted" to an Internet address. This Internet address points to a so called relay gateway, a service provided by SURFnet, where the mail is relayed from the Internet to X.400.

An X.400 address is translated to an Internet address (usable in, e.g., Eudora) as follows. As an example we take an EZ X.400 address, as it used to be.

  1. Determine the X.400 address.
    Example: dhr. S.G. Zeelenberg, department POI/IA:
     C=NL;A=400NET;P=MIN EZ;O=MIN EZ;OU=POI;OU=IA;S=Zeelenberg;I=SG 
    Notice how the departments are put in two OU attributes (Organizational Unit). The RGD does not have those, by the way, there is just an O attribute (Organization).
  2. Surround the X.400 address with double quotes ("):
    "C=NL;A=400NET;P=MIN EZ;O=MIN EZ;OU=POI;OU=IA;S=Zeelenberg;I=SG"
  3. Append: @relay.surfnet.nl
    The end result is thus: "C=NL;A=400NET;P=MIN EZ;O=MIN EZ;OU=POI;OU=IA;S=Zeelenberg;I=SG"@relay.surfnet.nl
    Notice the spaces in the P and O attribute and in the S attribute (Surname), as in "van der Berg". Naturally, you will type an e-mail address like this only once: i.e. when you are defining it as a nickname in Eudora!
This translation is also carried out by the SURFnet RFC-822/X.400 address translator in a user-friendly interactive manner. Note again that this translator uses the "slash" ("/") as attribute separator in stead of the semi-colon (";"), which does not conform to the SURFnet guidelines in Annex A.3 of the SURFnet 94/95 guide. Both will work, by the way ;-).

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