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What aliases are and how to use them in the Elm mail system
The Elm Mail System
(Version 2.4)
Syd Weinstein, Elm Coordinator
Datacomp Systems, Inc.
3837 Byron Road
Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006-2320
email: elm@DSI.COM or dsinc!elm
Copyright 1986,1987 by Dave Taylor
Copyright 1988-1992 by The USENET Community Trust
The Elm Alias System Users Guide
(The Elm Mail System, Version 2.4)
October 1, 1992
Syd Weinstein
Datacomp Systems, Inc.
3837 Byron Road
Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006-2320
email: elm@DSI.COM or dsinc!elm
Derived from
The Elm Mail System, Version 2.0
by
Dave Taylor
Intuitive Systems
Mountain View, California
email: taylor@intuitive.com or limbo!taylor
This document is intended as a supplement to the Elm Users Guide and is only of interest to those users desiring more knowledge about how aliases work and how to create strange and exciting aliases for their systems (okay, so maybe it's not that exciting!)
This document is broken up into the following sections; user aliases, group aliases, system aliases, editing and installing new aliases, general warnings and other chit-chat.
The simplest type of aliases in the Elm system are individual user aliases. These are made up of three parts; aliasname list = username = address
Where the aliasname list is either a single aliasname
1. Aliasnames can be any combination of letters, numbers, hyphens (-), periods (.), or underscores (_). Letter case is not significant, that is, FRED, Fred, and fred are identical. or a list of aliasnames separated by commas. Aliasnames are case insensitive and will be converted to all lower case by the alias system.
Username is used to indicate the full real name of the user. For example, if you had an alias for taylor to get to me, the username field would contain Dave Taylor or perhaps Dave Taylor at HP or some other permutation. The name can optionally be entered in the format of Taylor; Dave. When this is done, the alias system can sort aliases on a last name basis for presentation on the alias menu within Elm. Elm uses this information to add the user's full name to the addresses of outbound mail to get more readable addresses. No matter which format a name is entered, Elm displays it and puts it in mail headers the way you would expect (i.e., Dave Taylor).
Address is either the user's full electronic mail address or, if your system uses a smart mailer, the minimum address needed to specify the destination. For example, say my smart mailer contained information on how to get to machine hp-sdd and I wanted to have an address for my friend Ken there - I could have his address specified as simply ken@hp-sdd (or alternatively hp-sdd!ken since the two are functionally equivalent).
Let's get on to some examples, shall we?
Consider this excerpt from my own .elm/aliases.text file;
# Mail aliases for Dave Taylor
# Friends from UCSD
addie = Addie Silva = addie@hp-sdd.SDD.HP.COM
frank,minjarez = Frank Minjarez = Minjarez.Verify@dockmaster.ddn.mil
pizzini = Ken Pizzini
= hplabs!ucbvax!ucdavis!pai!ken
george = Burdell;
George P., Famous GT Guy= gburdell@matd.gatech.edu
Note that the alias for Frank Minjarez has two aliasnames associated with it, frank and minjarez. Also notice that thefirst and second aliases use the Internet style naming convention of user@machine whereas the third uses the uucp notation of machine!user. The fourth alias illustrates two features for the username field. An individual's name can be entered in the form of lastname; firstname, comment which allows the alias system to be able to sort alias names on a last name basis. Additionally, any text after the comma is treated as a comment. It is stored n the alias file and displayed on the alias menu but will not appear in the comment field (between the parentheses) in the header of a message. This allows you to enter useful notes about1an individual that you would not otherwise want to include in theTo: header of a mail message.
For the most part, the notational format is transparent within the alias file - the only time it does make a difference is if you have to specify more than the machine that the user is receiving mail on (as in the third example above).
Suffice to say that if you must specify any sort of uucp routethat you should use the uucp notation as much as possible to ensure that the system expands the correct machine name. Similarly, if you're bouncing mail through different Internet sites (to get to a foreign system, as in the example below) you should use the notation that system expects, e.g.:
listserv%byuadmin.BITNET@rugters.edu
After the confusion of user aliases, group aliases are even
more fun! For the most part the notation is very similar:
aliasname list = groupname =
address list
Where aliasname list and groupname are exactly equivalent to
the corresponding fields in user aliases.
The interesting part is the address list field; this field is actually in the same notation as the aliasname list (i.e., a list of addresses separated by commas), so it's really quite easy to create. It's best to illustrate by example:
friends, mypals = The Gang of Six = joe, larry, mary, joanna,
nancy, michael
Notice that you can continue onto as many lines as you'd like so long as each additional line starts with either a <space> or a <tab> character.
At times it may be desirable to send a message to everyone in the group except one or two people. This can be accomplished by adding the individuals' actual IDs to the To: list, preceded by a minus sign (-). For example, if you were having a surprise party for nancy from the above group and you wanted to discuss the details with the others, you could mail the message to:
friends -nancy
Unlike in prior versions of Elm, group alias addresses need not be previously defined aliases or valid mail addresses on the current machine. Any valid delivery address, local user, or prior user or group alias may now be part of a group alias address list.
System aliases are functionally equivalent to the individual
Elm alias lists each Elm user has (both
user aliases and group aiases) but are read only
for everyone but the Elm
administrator. The format of the file is identical to the users'
files, and the only difference is that this file is expected
to be located in the directory that contains the system_hash_file
and system_data_file files (see the Elm Configuration Guide
for
more details on these variables).
Simply create the system alias file in the specified directory as
you would a normal alias file, and install it using the newalias
command with the -g option (see the following section for
more details on that). Voila!!
To install new aliases, you need merely to create, or modify, the
file $HOME/.elm/aliases.text until you're satisfied with it
and it meets the requirements discussed above. You can then
try to
install it with the command:
$ newalias
which either reports the number of aliases installed or the errors encountered trying to parse and store the given alias list.
Note that blank lines are no problem and that comments are
not first character of each comment line.
Probably the biggest question you have in your mind right now
is But how the heck does this relate to my existing Berkeley
Mail aliases and the lower-level sendmail alias system?
Well, rest assured that if you really want to have your
aliases down in the transport you can. No problem.
And for those ex-Berkeley Mail fans, you
can translate your aliases into the format
that Elm wants by running them through the awk script listed in the appendix.
Finally, if you have any problems or questions, try
looking in the newalias manual entry.
Appendix One
An awk Script for Translating Aliases
from a Berkeley Mail .mailrc File
to an Elm .elm/aliases.text File
BEGIN { print
"# Elm .elm/aliases.text file, from a .mailrc file..."
print ""
}
next_line
== 1 {
next_line = 0;
group = ""
for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
if (i == NF && $i == "\\") sep = ""
else
sep = ", "
if ($i == "\\") {
group = sprintf("%s,", group)
next_line = 1;
}
else if (length(group) > 0)
group = sprintf("%s%s%s", group, sep, $i);
else
group = $i;
}
group =
sprintf("%s,", group)
next_line = 1;
}
else if (length(group) > 0)
group = sprintf("%s%s%s", group, sep, $i);
else
group = $i;
}
print "\t" group
}
$1 ~ /[Aa]lias
| [Gg]roup/ {
if ( NF == 3)
print $2 " = user alias = " $3;
else {
group = ""
for (i = 3; i <= NF; i++) {
if (i == NF && $i == "\\") sep = ""
else sep = ", "
if ($i == "\\") {
group = sprintf("%s,", group)
next_line = 1;
}
else if (length(group) > 0)
group = sprintf("%s%s%s", group, sep, $i);
else
group = $i;
}
print $2 " = group alias = " group;
}
}
Note: this script is contained in the release as utils/mailrc.awk.
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