The Elm Alias System Users Guide What aliases are and how to use them in the Elm mail system The Elm Mail System (Version 2.5) Bill Pemberton, Elm Coordinator University of Virginia - ITC PO Box 9029 Charlottesville, VA 22906 email: flash@virginia.edu Copyright 1986,1987 by Dave Taylor Copyright 1988-1996 by The USENET Community Trust 9 The Elm Alias System Users Guide 9 (The Elm Mail System, Version 2.5) October 1, 1996 Bill Pemberton, Elm Coordinator University of Virginia - ITC PO Box 9029 Charlottesville, VA 22906 email: flash@virginia.edu 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 excit- ing!) 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. 1.... User Aliases The simplest type of aliases in the Elm system are individual user aliases. These are made up of three parts; aliasname list = username = address Alias Users Guide Version 2.5 9 Alias Users Guide Version 2.5 9 Where the aliasname list is either a single aliasname819 or a list of aliasnames separated by commas. Aliasnames are case insensi- tive 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 Tay- lor 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 presenta- tion 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 en- tered, 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 con- tained 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 ad- dress 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 associ- ated with it, frank and minjarez. Also notice that the first 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 in 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 about an individual that you would not otherwise want to include in the __________ 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. October 1, 1996 Page 2 9 Alias Users Guide Version 2.5 9 To:::: 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 re- ceiving mail on (as in the third example above). Suffice to say that if you must specify any sort of uucp route that you should use the uucp notation as much as possible to en- sure that the system expands the correct machine name. Similar- ly, 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 2.... Group Aliases 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 ac- tually 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 or a 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 ad- ding 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 pri- or user or group alias may now be part of a group alias address list. October 1, 1996 Page 3 9 Alias Users Guide Version 2.5 9 3.... System Aliases System aliases are functionally equivalent to the individual Elm alias lists each Elm user has (both user aliases and group aliases) but are read only for everyone but the Elm administra- tor. The format of the file is identical to the users' files, and the only difference is that this file is expected to be lo- cated 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!! 4.... Editing and Installing New Aliases 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 er- rors encountered trying to parse and store the given alias list. Note that blank lines are no problem and that comments are not only allowed but actually encouraged, and must have '#' as the first character of each comment line. 5.... Other Stuff not Covered Yet 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. October 1, 1996 Page 4 9 Alias Users Guide Version 2.5 9 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; } 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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