PMDF System Manager's Guide

PMDF provides facilities to convert such attachments into MIME body parts. However, these facilities need some sort of flag so they know what messages need to be processed. Unfortunately no convenient flag (e.g., a distinguishing header line) is provided by Pathworks MAIL itself, so a flag had to be chosen that could be associated with incoming Pathworks MAIL messages.

The flag PMDF has chosen is a special "X-Mailer:" header line. The contents of this header line must be either "Pathworks MAIL V4.0" or "Pathworks MAIL V4.1". Header lines of this sort tell PMDF that it is faced with a message that can contain one or more file attachments. PMDF can then be told to scan this message and convert it into MIME format.

The most convenient way to add this header line to messages coming from Pathworks MAIL for PCs is to define the PMDF_HEADER logical appropriately. This can be done automatically in the context of the Pathworks MAIL server process by adding the following definition either to the appropriate user LOGIN.COM files or to the system-wide SYLOGIN.COM file (if everyone uses the same version of Pathworks MAIL):

$ if f$mode() .eqs. "NETWORK" then - if f$locate("PCSA$MAIL",f$logical("SYS$NET")) .lt. - f$length(f$logical("SYS$NET")) then - define pmdf_header "X-Mailer: Pathworks Mail V4.1"

This definition is conditionalized so it only applies to Pathworks MAIL servers. Any messages sent to PMDF will then have the appropriate X-Mailer: header.

It is also necessary to instruct PMDF to convert these messages to MIME format. This is done by adding a special channel to your configuration to associate with incoming Pathworks MAIL and then adding instructions to request MIME conversions for this channel to your mapping file.

The special channel block for incoming Pathworks MAIL should look like this:

d_pathworks PATHWORKS-MAIL

The channel block is all that's needed; this channel is only used as a placeholder and needs no rewrite rules.

The next step is to add appropriate instructions to the CHARSET-CONVERSION table in your mapping file to activate MIME format conversion. A single entry of the form

CHARSET-CONVERSION IN-CHAN=d_pathworks;OUT-CHAN=*;CONVERT Yes

will activate the conversion procedure for all messages entering PMDF via the Pathworks MAIL channel. The CHARSET-CONVERSION mapping is described in Chapter 6.