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The Elm Mail System
The Elm Alias System Users Guide
What aliases are and how to use them in the Elm mail system
- 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;
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 or a list of aliasnames separated by commas. Aliasnames are case insensitive and will be converted to all lower case by the alias system.
(Note: aliasnames can be any combination of letters, numbers, dashes (`-'), periods (`.'), or underscores (`_'). Letter case is not significant. That is `FRED' and `Fred' are identical.)
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 users full name to the addresses of outbound mail to get more readable addresses. No matter which format a name is entered, Elm will display it and put it in mail headers the way you would expect (i.e., `Dave Taylor').
Address is either the users full electronic mail address or, if your system uses a smart mailer, the minimum address needed to specify the destination. For example, say 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.eduNote that the alias for Frank Minjarez has two aliasnames associated 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' 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 ()'s) in the header of a message. This allows you to enter useful notes about an individual that you would not otherwise want to include on the To: line 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 route that 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:
- istserv%byuadmin.BITNET@rugters.edu
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After the confusion of user aliases, group aliases are even more fun! For the most part the notation is very similar;
- Where aliasname list and groupname are exactly equivalent to the corresponding fields in user aliases.
The interesting part is the list of people field; this field is actually in the same notation as the aliasname list (i.e., a list of addresses separated by a single comma), 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 individual(s) actual id(s) 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 aliases need not be a previously defined alias or a valid mail address on the current machine. Any valid delivery address, local user, or prior local or group alias may now be part of a group alias.
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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 administrator. The format of the file is identical to the users file, 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 the same way (see the following section for more details on that).
Voila!!
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To install new aliases, you need merely to create, or modify, the file .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 will either report back the number of aliases installed or any errors 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.
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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. All you'll need to do is to turn off the address validation routine in Elm.
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.
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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 under the name ``mailrc.awk'' in the utilities directory ``utils''.
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This page last modified: December 20, 2002
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