Getting Lotus Softswitch EMX Email to Internet

The pre-IBM Lotus subsidary Softswitch made a emailswitch, EMX, with capacity to handle mail from ccMail, MS-Mail and to/from Internet/X.400.

Unfortunatly the EMX switch had a deficiency. It could not send mail directly from a MS-Mail user to a receiver on Internet/X.400, without the internal user prevously received a letter from the intended external receiver or that the sysadmin had registred the receiving external address in the switch.

AmuGruppen, now Lernia, started in 1993 to use the SS EMX as it main email postoffice, but during the winter -93/-94 it where found that the switch did not work as intended. The systemadmin at AmuGruppen Mitt AB challenged us to find a solution. It where one and it was simple enough.

1. You create a mailbox on a Unix server, so you get a external intermediary user address to registred in the switch.
2. To this mailbox you connects a shellscript mail processor, that reads the incoming emails into a file and processe this file. The emails has the correct external receiver's address at its first line, formated like "To: internet address".
3. In the case of Amu, we tied the script to cron, that where running it once every minute. If any email in the box, the addresses both for receiver, as sender where rewritten to hide the detour.
4. Any replies to the email went then directly to the sender through the EMX switch. Due to this the external user then got automatically registred in the switch, so any future communications went directly.

In spring -96 Lotus Softswitch came with their own solution to the problem, similar to ours, but not needing an extra server. Our solution can be of interest to others with other gateways, having similar problems.

One interesting note though, we was looking to include X.400 support when Lotus released their version, having both Internet/X.400. While we where thinking of using regex to decide if the address was a Internet or X.400 address, Lotus solution required that the user to write "To Inet: " or "To x.400:". Where did the knowledge of regex go?

The script has also been discussed at length in the previous mentioned article in Sys Admin Magazine.

The code for the shell script for inetmail.