Access to BITNET mailer gateways is provided by defining additional channels, one per mailer, in the configuration file. BITNET mailer gateway channel names must always begin with bit_ for Jnet channels or with anje_ for ANJE channels. The channel blocks have the general form:

bit_interbit smtp daemon smtp user mailer INTERBIT.BITNET

INTERBIT is a generic name for a local BITNET mailer gateway that provides access to the Internet. It should be one of the many Internet gateways on BITNET. Most gateways use SMTP, so they are marked smtp. The daemon keyword's argument specifies the username that is used as the intermediate destination on the gateway. The optional user keyword specifies the username that appears in the NJE origin tag field of the message header. Some mailer gateways insist on having the origin set to the name of a "trusted" user. Other gateways (such as INTERBIT) will send failed message notices to the user whose name appears in the origin tag field.

Mailers that check the origin tag field check both the user and system parts of the tag. The user keyword can be used to set the user part of the tag, but the system name in the tag must also be registered. This is not normally a problem since the registered system name is what Jnet or ANJE will use. However, in a VAXcluster configuration it can be convenient to register the cluster alias as the system name that must appear in the tag. Jnet will use the cluster alias in the tag for messages sent by PMDF if the following logical name definition is made:

$ DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC JAN_BN_MASTER_FLAGS 1

The use of such JAN_ logical names is fully described in the Jnet documentation.

Versions of PMDF prior to version 3.0 actually invoked the Jnet SENDFILE program and thus their use of the cluster alias was controlled by the JAN_SENDFILE_FLAGS logical name. This changed with PMDF 3.0 when support was added to call the file sending routines in JANSHR directly.

The flags mechanism is not available with ANJE.

Certain gateways can restrict the number of addresses that can appear in a single copy of a message so it can be appropriate to add the single or single_sys keywords to the channel block for some gateway channels.

Once a channel block for a gateway is created it is ready to use; there are no log files to create.