In a major re-vamp of its electronic mail offerings, Digital Equipment Corp has launched an X400-based version of its Mailbus software. The company also continued its practice of tagging the word ‘Works’ onto the end of its products, and the latest victim is All-in-1 Mail which will renamed DEC MailWorks. The new Mailbus 400 is […]
In a major re-vamp of its electronic mail offerings, Digital Equipment Corp has launched an X400-based version of its Mailbus software. The company also continued its practice of tagging the word ‘Works’ onto the end of its products, and the latest victim is All-in-1 Mail which will renamed DEC MailWorks. The new Mailbus 400 is a development of the company’s existing Mailbus software – a proprietary store and forward system. One key market that DEC will target is the public sector where companies are bound by open systems procurement regulations and have been waiting for 1988 implementations of the X400 message transfer agent. However the existing proprietary software will continue to be sold alongside the new offering, and Girish Naik, UK marketing manager for office systems, says that Mail 400 is likely to lack the performance of the older offering due to the complexity of the open standard and the way in which the proprietary code has been tweaked for running in the VMS environment. There is also the question of gateways – over the years, Mailbus has accrued a number of gateways to proprietary systems, some of which will not immediately be available for the new version. The idea, presumably, is that in the medium term, X400 will become ubiquitous, and gateways redundant. Despite these possible snags, the company is helping existing users move over to the new system. Not only does Mailbus 400 support Open Systems Interconnection’s X500 mail directory standard, it also copes with the company’s old distributed directory service. As a result, mixed networks of old and new should work together, according to Naik. As for availability, Mailbus 400 is starting off as an Ultrix application, before being migrated to the VAX/VMS world. Naik says that this reflects partly the software’s dependency on the new OSI version of DECnet. DECnet OSI is scheduled to start shipping for Ultrix in July, but will not appear for the VAX until this autumn. Until then, potential customers for Mailbus 400 will have to wait.
