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One of the questions being asked by messaging system architects is: Can SMTP/MIME meet the messaging requirements of a large global enterprise? A qualified yes is the answer; assuming further extensions to MIME would be required, primarily in the areas of message management. Members of the IETF have shown great resiliency in further enhancing messaging functionality over the Internet when the need arises. IETF members could develop the missing pieces to make SMTP/MIME functionally similar to X.400.
The most important comparisons between X.400 and SMTP/MIME concern functionality, security, systems management, message management, management manpower requirements, and performance.
X.400 is more advanced in this respect, but developers are working to improve SMTP/MIME to match X.400s functionality.
Message security capabilities provided by the X.400 standards are far superior to SMTP/MIME. However, there are very few large-scale implementations that take advantage of the numerous security-related features specified within the standards.
Internet security is a major concern for many users. Although security options (such as software for trusted and privacy enhanced mail) exist, they are not widely and uniformly deployed.
Besides lacking security, SMTP/MIME lacks reliable audit trails. Spoofing, a process by which someone masquerades as another correspondent, is easily done via Internet mail. A user is also allowed to send a message through a rE-mailer service so that the original address is not attached to the message when it arrives at its final destination. It is therefore almost impossible to audit messages.
X.400 has greater potential in this respect. The entire area of management including message management, component management, and complete MHS management needs more attention. The experience of E-mail managers in large organizations demonstrates the need for many additional management tools for a large, complex messaging network.
Managing complex, enterprisewide messaging systems is difficult for several reasons:
Much work has been done on developing standards to govern the individual components associated with X.400. Although very little agreement has been reached on how to manage these various components. The network administrator must have tools and utilities available to manage day-to-day network operations. A fully deployed messaging system such as DMS with 2 million users will carry several million messages per day.
Significant work has started on developing industry standards specific to E-mail management. A joint International Federation Information Processing (IFIP) group examined the overall problem of messaging management. A similar IETF task force led to the development of RFC 1566 (also known as the Mail and Directory Management MIB, or MADMAN MIB), which defines a class of managed objects that can be deployed within any vendors messaging architecture. The MADMAN MIB, however, is oriented to the Internet and SMTP, and therefore lacks the ability to model some of the more complex features present in X.400-based systems.
Simple network management protocol (SNMP) and SNMP version 2, both of which are associated with the SMTP/MIME environment, are the leading protocols for managing network transport functions. However, SNMP does not work across non-TCP/IP transports. The management information base (MIB) is a definition of the managed object (i.e., what can be managed remotely). The MADMAN MIB is complete with approved standard definitions, but very limited in functionality (i.e., monitoring only). SNMP and the MIB definitions are only 5% of the puzzle, however.
The ITU-TSS and the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) are currently working on the following MHS management documents:
General: | ||
MHS Management Model and Architecture | X.460 | |
MHS Management Information | X.461 | |
Management Functions for MHS: | ||
Logging | X.462 | |
Security | X.463 | |
Configuration | X.464 | |
Fault Management | X.465 | |
Performance Management | X.466 |
The Electronic Messaging Association (EMA) is working on a framework that will allow management of multivendor messaging systems. The EMAs work leverages the IFIPs work and is aligned with the MADMAN MIB definitions. The effort is broad in scope because it also addresses the area of message tracing and standardizing a set of tasks for message management across a multivendor environment. The EMAs Messaging Management Committee has characterized requirements for messaging management in the following four major categories:
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