Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!topaz.rutgers.edu!ron From: ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: What is MMDF Message-ID: <17011@topaz.rutgers.edu> Date: 13 Dec 87 17:12:26 GMT References: <3047@phri.UUCP> <7807@g.ms.uky.edu> <540@ncrcan.Toronto.NCR.COM> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 36 MMDF is the Multichannel Memo Distribution Facility. This was originally developed at the University of Delaware on a PDP-11/70 running some early (V7?) unix. One of the original uses for this system was for the DARCOM (Army) PACE message server. Principal author at the time was Dave Crocker. MMDF consists of multiple delivery channels. These channels each deal with a different type of mail delivery. The SMTP channel handles mail on the internet, the UUCP channel through UUCP, etc... Two specialized channels are the Phonenet and local channels. Phonenet is a special machine-to-machine mail transfer protocol that runs over dial-up phone lines. Many people mistakenly refer to this channel as MMDF, but MMDF is the overall system including all the channels. Another channel, the local channel, delivers mail into individual mailboxes on the local machine. Various "user agents" read the mailbox files and interact with the rest of MMDF using a binary protocol (implemented as a subroutine library) over pipes. In addition to a sendmail emulator, there are interfaces to a MM-like mail reader (msg) and various composing programs. MMDF has undergone a lot of change in the past seven years. Development work proceded at the University of Delaware along with Johns Hopkins University and the Ballistic Research Laboratory. Doug Kinston was primarily involved with the core work. MMDF was selected early on to be used to form CSNET and a majority of the support for MMDF comes from there. The phonenet slave was tranlated into Pascal and has grown into a large (primarily VMS) product called PMDF. The basic answer is that both sendmail and mmdf have their limitations (I don't like either). The user interfaces from MMDF are very nice, but the way that the various channels and user interfaces interoperate are rather obscure. Configuration is somewhat easier than with sendmail, but not as rich in what you can do. -Ron