MCI Mail <--> Internet/UUCP gateway?

[Michael C. Berch]

We just had a sales presentation by a rep for MCI Mail, who was
promoting their "Link" service that is designed to connect MCI Mail
with various internal and proprietary e-mail systems called REMS
(remote e-mail system) and VREMS (very remote e-mail system).

The view-graphs for the sales presentation showed a couple of
interesting diagrams -- one showed an oval marked "ARPA" connected to
the MCI oval with a line marked "Link". A box next to the diagram
showed an example outbound message of the form

To: John Q. User
EMS: ARPA
MBX: foo@bar

or something like that, with "ARPA" being the remote e-mail system
and foo@bar being the mailbox. The salesman and I tried it from his
account, but it didn't recognize ARPA as an EMS.

Assuming the slide was a real example and not a "what if", it looks
like there is a gateway somewhere. Since their billing policy is to
charge only for sending messages, they require each user of a REMS or
VREMS to be registered; thus no large-scale Internet -> MCI or UUCP -> MCI
mail gateway seems likely. MCI -> Internet or MCI -> UUCP seems more
possible. He had no information on possible private gateways, though.

We are interested in investigating some possibilities, including becoming
a gateway (private or general-use?), doing a RFC821/822 to MEP2 (their
proprietary transport protocol) conversion implementation, or possibly
looking towards their planned X.400 implementation.

Information on any of these topics would be greatly appreciated.

Michael C. Berch
Control Data Corp. / Lawrence Livermore Natl. Laboratory
ARPA: m...@lll-tis-b.ARPA
UUCP: {ihnp4,dual,sun}!lll-lcc!styx!mcb