In article <199702121154.LAA12110@???>,
Martin Hamilton <martin@???> wrote:
>--==_Exmh_-1546120344P
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>
>Neal Becker writes:
>
>| I heard there is some new protocol for directory information, called
>| ldat or something like that, sort of like x500 but over ip. Anyone
>| know anything about it? Something to port to exim maybe?
>
>Did you mean LDAP ? <URL:http://www.umich.edu/~rsug/ldap/>
>
>Seems to me that the most likely scenario for using LDAP with Exim is
>that you might want to do an LDAP lookup to return a list of possible
>recipients when delivery fails. This wouldn't require any changes to
>Exim, though - just a wrapper around one of the command line LDAP
>clients ?
Another scenario is direct delivery to a users mailbox. Large
organizations (e.g. ISP's, Fortune 1000 companies, Universities) tend
have the mailboxes for their users on more than one server. But want
to have their users publish a simple and consistant mail address.
Typically users@???.
The usual implementation of this is to punt all mail for the top
level domain to a single gateway machine and then have it forward
mail to the correct server. In fact this is done at Cambridge for
example using the lookup driver. But could be done using an LDAP
query.
In fact the University of Michigan and Stanford are both doing
so with LDAP, not with exim though.
I am currently looking at how this can be formalized.
If you consider an organization with multiple offices in widely
distributed areas (i.e. far away from each other in terms of
network latency) it would be nice to have a standard mechanism
that outside mail transfer agents could use to lookup a top
user @ level domain and get the actual correct delivery
location.
For example I work for iSTAR Internet. We have users and servers
in Toronto and Vancouver. If someone in Vancouver sends me
mail it would be better if the mail could be directly delivered
to my server instead of having to go to the central machine
in Toronto.
In the broader scale of things as the network grows this may
become an way to reduce the number of hops mail has to take
to be delivered. Which in turn can reduce the number of
servers that large ISP's or companies need to have to
service their customers.
--
Stuart Lynne <sl@???> 604-933-1000 <http://www.poste.com>
PGP Fingerprint: 28 E2 A0 15 99 62 9A 00 88 EC A3 EE 2D 1C 15 68
