--On Friday, May 15, 2009 12:39 +0200 Arnt Gulbrandsen
<arnt(_at_)oryx(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
I am still trying to figure out what kind of animal "mcimail"
is and whether it needs to be added to this registry as well.
MCImail was a proprietary thing maybe 20 years ago. I don't
know when it disappeared for good, but it's gone now so I
think not adding it is fair, no matter what the purpose of the
entry once was.
...
It was an X.400 ADMD (with some considerable traffic in that
role) as well as a proprietary email and email to paper and fax
system). As an X.400 ADMD, it was capable of routing X.400 mail
to and from other X.400 systems as well as accepting and sending
X.400 traffic for its own PRMD and organizational customers.
I'm not sure whether one can dismiss X.400-compliant systems as
"proprietary" -- it didn't use MUAs that were visibly compliant
to those parts of the X.400 specs, but almost no one else did
either. It also had an Internet gateway (one of the first from
a commercial email system) which, during at least most of its
life, went via the X.400 interface and syntax (probably the RFC
987ff specs, rather than the MIXER one). It disappeared for
good in the last half of the 90s. Perhaps ironically, Dave
Crocker had a design role in getting it set up and initiated and
I had some role in the eventual shutdown.
The service is gone, the ADMD is gone operationally, and MCI is
gone so, on that basis, it would be safe to treat the
registration as historic. On the other hand, I doubt that the
ADMD was ever formally de-registered and, whether they know it
or not, that registration probably passed to either Cable and
Wireless (as part of the internetMCI deal) or Verizon (as part
of acquisition of what was left of MCI after the WorldCom
debacle). So, in principle, if X.400 ever had a resurgence, the
ADMD might reappear although it would surprise me.
That should answer the "what sort of beast" question. Whether
it should be moved to the newer registry depends on what one
thinks of the future (or even the present) of X.400 systems as
participants in Internet message handling.
john