🚀 go-pugleaf

Either this is a religious question, or I'm just totally confused. :-)

In the X.400 implementations I am examining, there appear to be two distinct
ways of addressing users or access units:

- The MTA is identified by the entire O/R name, except for the personal name.
  Within that particular MTA, users and other access units are addressed only
  by the personal name. If the same network node is to be responsible for,
  say, two different organization units, then either two MTAs have to be run
  concurrently, or some form of kludge applied to the MTA (like aliases for
  components of the O/R name).

- The MTA controls little more than the country code, ADMD, and PRMD. Each
  user is assigned a full O/R name. Thus one MTA can be responsible for as
  many different logical domains, orgnization names, organization units, and
  so on as there is room in the routing tables.

The first scheme is what I am used to in UNIX and most PC mailers: one MTA is
never responsible for more than one fully qualified domain. The second scheme
is obviously more flexible, although it seems to come at the price of dragging
along a large volume of information for each user; it also seems vulnerable to
configuration errors. And the first scheme can achieve the same flexability by
running multiple MTAs on the same network node, which should be simple if the
design has been done correctly.

Any comments? Is one of these more "right" than the other? Anyone out there
have administrative experience with both?

<csg>