How to send mail to CIN

As most of you know, the Conservation Information Network, an
information utility run by the Getty Conservation Institute in
cooperation with the Canadian Heritage Information Network, has as one
of its components an email service, of sorts.  The mail system makes use
of GEMDES, a Canadian government system (formerly called Envoy 100), and
until recently, it was not possible to send mail between CIN and the
Internet.  Fortunately, this has changed, but before I tell you how to
go about sending mail to CIN users, I want to give a you few reasons why
you probably shouldn't do so without first obtaining the consent of your
intended recipient.  Note also, that I won't be soliciting CIN users for
the DistList, for reasons that will become obvious.

A.  Cautions

Caution 1.  GEMDES mail is EXPENSIVE!

    The CIN mail system is not free.  Far from it.  Users are charged
    $.70 for every 1000 characters read or typed.  This includes the
    characters they have to type to issue a read-mail instruction, to
    type in a response, and of course, all the characters in your
    message.  The item you are now reading (up to the end of the last
    sentence) would cost your recipient a little over $.70.  A typical
    DistList would cost about $15 and a largish DistList as much as $25.
    The Conservation Email Directory would cost $135.  Unsolicited mail
    to CIN users (especially *this* CIN user) will most likely not be
    greeted with enthusiasm.  To make matters worse, many CIN users do
    not understand the pricing structure, although the Getty folks try
    to explain it periodically. I managed to run up a $190 bill in my
    first month, when the net first came up.

Caution 2.  CIN users are often not very comfortable with email.

    As a practical matter CIN users (perhaps because of the high costs)
    seem not to read their mail very often.  GEMDES users have, to be
    generous, a confusing manual and many (probably most) will have
    difficulty responding to your message.  When your message arrives it
    comes tagged with a semi-cryptic note at the beginning of the
    message (which note the user will likely never have seen before)
    instructing the user on how to reply to the Internet.  Unfortunately
    the note is long gone by the time the user replies.  As far as I can
    tell, CIN users haven't been informed about the existence of a
    gateway, so presumably the Getty folks are not yet prepared to
    support gatewayed mail, so the user will probably be on his/her own.

Caution 3 Do not PUBLICIZE the gateway

    Do NOT repost this information to other lists, publish it in print
    or in any other way widely disseminate the information.  I have
    spoken to the folks at nasamail.nasa.gov about our use of the
    gateway and they are very helpful, but they are concerned about the
    gateways capacity being overstressed if the traffic increases
    drastically.  Now we are not going to tip the scales, but if someone
    were to repost this to PACS-L or ALCTS Network News and the traffic
    increased dramatically, the NASA people will have trouble and I will
    have broken my word and will have to commit seppuku and it will all
    be on your head.  (The NASA people are willing to talk about
    "re-architecting" the gateway to handle more traffic if it does
    become necessary, but I have promised them that my announcement here
    would not add much to the burden)

B.  HOW TO DO IT

So, if you still want to try it, and know that your recipient is
technoid enough to handle it and is willing to pay dearly for the
privelege, (uh, need I mention that I will NOT appreciate receiving mail
in my cin account?), here's how to do it.

CIN accounts have names like cin.xyz where xyz is the individual
user/institution (usually it's a reasonably mnemonic name).  To mail to
user cin.xyz, mail your message to
 hold on to your chair, (you thought normal Internet names were fun...)

  To: /c=canada/admd=telecom.canada/id=cin.xyz/
      s=gettyconservationinstitute8/ [at] nasamail__nasa__gov

Note that there should NOT be a line break after the xyz/

It really is one long line, but who has a terminal that wide?  Now, your
mail User Agent (the program you use to compose messages and to post
them), in most cases will choke on this address (who wouldn't), so you
will have to ask your system people for help on how to do it on your
specific machine.  For the techies among you, everything before the @ is
an x.400 address (you will be seeing more of these as time goes by), and
nasamail.nasa.gov is a gateway.


C.  ADDITIONAL INFO FOR UNIX USERS

For those of you on BSD unix systems (eg SunOs), if your mail user agent
(or the shell, for that matter (remember, you may have to 'escape' the
slashes like this: To:\/c=canada\/admd=etc...)), chokes on that address,
you can act as your own user agent post the message directly with
sendmail.   With your editor, create a file that looks like this:

    To:/c=canada/admd=etc...
    Subject: This is my subject

    This is my message.  The first header (To:) should be the very first
    line of the file and there must be a blank line between the last header
    (in this case the Subject: field) and the first line of the body of the
    message.  Although this example is indented for clarity, your
    message, of course, won't be.

Save this file as (for example) cin.msg and then at the shell prompt
type:
    /usr/lib/sendmail -t < cin.msg

These instructions are for BSD and similar systems.  I don't know where
sendmail is on, eg, System 5, so you may need to modify this
accordingly. 

                                  ***
                   Conservation DistList Instance 5:9
                  Distributed: Saturday, July 13, 1991
                        Message Id: cdl-5-9-004
                                  ***