HP OpenVMS Systems Documentation

Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS
Release Notes

The whois is available in this release, but no Help file is available. To define the whois command, enter the following command:

$ whois :== $SYS$SYSTEM:TCPIP$WHOIS.EXE 

The whois utility looks up user, host, and organization names in the Network Information Center (NIC) database.

The syntax for the whois command is as follows:

$ whois [-h server] 

The -h option allows you to specify a whois server other than the default ( rs.internic.net ).

The server name can specify any of the following:

• The name of the registered user.
• The name of a registered Internet host.
• The name of some other entity recognized by the whois server. By default, the whois command queries the host rs.internic.net .

The operands specified for the whois command are concatenated together (separated by spaces) and presented to the whois server. The default action, unless directed otherwise with a special name, is to do a very broad search, looking for matches to name in all types of records and most fields (such as name, nicknames, host name, and network address) in the database.

For example:

$ whois osf.org 
 
Open Software Foundation (OSF-DOM) 
 
11 Cambridge Center 
 
Cambridge, MA  02142 
 
 
Domain Name:  OSF.ORG 
   .
   .
   .

The information in the Compaq TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS Guide to IPv6 should be updated with the information in Appendix D.

The IMAP Server for OpenVMS Mail and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server software work together to provide reliable mail management in a client/server environment.

The IMAP Server allows users to access their OpenVMS Mail mailboxes by clients such as Microsoft Outlook so that they can view, move, copy and delete messages. The SMTP Server provides the extra functionality of allowing the clients to create and send e-mail messages.

After the IMAP Server is enabled on your system, you can modify the default characteristics by editing the configuration file (described in Section A.2.3).

This chapter reviews key IMAP concepts and describes:

• How to start up and shut down the IMAP Server ( Section A.2.1)
• How to modify IMAP server characteristics ( Section A.2.3)
• How to enable MIME mail using IMAP ( Section A.3)

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. The IMAP Server allows users to access their OpenVMS Mail mailboxes by clients communicating with the IMAP4 protocol as defined in RFC 2060. The supported clients used to access e-mail are PC clients running Microsoft Outlook or Netscape Communicator.

The IMAP server is by default assigned port number 143, and all IMAP client connections are made to this port.

The following sections review the IMAP process and describe how the TCP/IP Services software implements IMAP. If you are not familiar with IMAP, refer to RFC 2060 or introductory IMAP documentation for more information.

A.1.1 IMAP Server Process

The IMAP Server is installed with SYSPRV, BYPASS, DETACH, SYSLCK, SYSNAM, NETMBX, and TMPMBX privileges. It runs in the TCPIP$IMAP account, which receives the correct quotas from the TCPIP$CONFIG procedure. The IMAP Server is invoked by the auxiliary server.

The IMAP Server uses security features provided in the protocol and in the OpenVMS operating system, as well as additional security measures. These methods provide a secure process that minimizes the possibility of inappropriate access to a user's mail file on the served system.

You can modify the IMAP Server default characteristics and implement new characteristics by defining the configuration options described in Section A.2.3.

A.1.2 How to Access Mail Messages from the IMAP Server

The only client configuration that is required is in the user's IMAP client, (see Section A.1.2.1). Additional optional configuration settings can be made in the OpenVMS Mail utility (see Section A.1.2.2).

A.1.2.1 IMAP Client Configuration

To access mail messages from the IMAP Server, you configure a user name and password into your client mail application. If an account is accessible without a password and a password is provided, the password is ignored.

In OpenVMS Mail, a user's mailbox file is, by default, named MAIL.MAI and is resident in the user's default OpenVMS directory. In this simple and typical case, the user name to be configured is the user's OpenVMS account name.

An OpenVMS Mail user is allowed to have many mail files; a special syntax for the user name is defined so that the user can specify the set of mail files to be opened. This syntax is the user's OpenVMS account name followed by a percent sign and then partial file specifications of the mail files, each separated by a percent sign. Note the following:

• The file extension of .MAI is not required.
• The default MAIL.MAI file is assumed, but if the user adds it to the list, it will not be displayed twice.

In the following example, user SMITH has three mail files in a mail directory. One is the user's default MAIL.MAI file, and the others are ACCOUNTS.MAI and PRIVATE.MAI. The user name would be configured in the IMAP client as:

SMITH%ACCOUNTS%PRIVATE 

Your client system opens the TCP connection and attempts to access the server by entering the IMAP LOGIN command with the configured user name and password. On successful connection, the user's mail files are the top level of mailboxes; so, in the preceding example, the mailboxes displayed will be Mail, Accounts, and Private. Unsuccessful attempts are logged in the event log file (see Section A.2.2).

Once an OpenVMS Mail user has successfully connected to the IMAP Server, a file called tcpip$imap_mailbox.dat will have been created in the user's OpenVMS mail directory. This file is a text file and has a record of the mailbox files specified by the user. The file contains a newline separated list of partial file specifications (completed by each user's mail directory and the .MAI suffix)

As a result of this, the following possibilities exist:

• Next time the user connects to the IMAP Server, the user may optionally remove percent signs and mailbox names from the user name field since they will have been recorded permanently in tcpip$imap_mailbox.dat. It will not make any difference if the user opts to leave the mailbox names in the user name field.
• The user may add extra mailbox names in a later connection, and the file tcpip$imap_mailbox.dat will be updated to provide a consolidated list.
• The IMAP Client software may create and delete mail files in the user's directory. These actions may be at the user's behest, or performed automatically such as the creation of a "Deleted Items" mailbox.
• A System Manager may wish to provide every user on the system with a preloaded tree of mailboxes, and this can be achieved by copying to each user's mail directory a pre-formatted copy of tcpip$imap_mailbox.dat.

Table A-1 describes the how the IMAP Server is affected by the settings of the OpenVMS Mail SET options.

OpenVMS Mail folders are presented to the IMAP client as IMAP mailboxes. All mailboxes are presented to the client in lowercase characters, beginning with an initial capital letter, and with capital letters following each space, at sign (@), opening parenthesis ( "(" ), underscore (_), and hyphen (-).

The NEWMAIL folder requires special treatment . Because the IMAP protocol requires a top-level mailbox called Inbox, the NEWMAIL folder is mapped to Inbox. When the user opens the mailbox called Mail (which maps to file MAIL.MAI), the NEWMAIL folder is not listed so that the user is not confused by seeing the same folder listed twice.

OpenVMS Mail folder names are usually in all uppercase characters but can contain lowercase characters. Any lowercase characters are mapped to an underscore (_) followed by the character's uppercase equivalent. Underscores are mapped to double underscores (__), and dollar signs are mapped to double dollar signs ($$).

Table A-2 shows effects of folder-name mappin