karl@osu-eddie.UUCP (Karl Kleinpaste) (02/04/85)
We have a problem having to do with distribution of mail.
On osu-eddie, we have a utility called "alumnus," which is a semi-public
login provided for use by alumni of the OSU CIS department. It provides a
highly limited environment for these individuals in order to give them
access to news and mail only, along with a few purely utilitarian functions.
(For example, we also allow the w, users, and finger commands.) The
individuals using alumnus must login under the single common name "alumnus,"
and thereafter the utility prompts for their "pseudologin name" and a
password before commencing normal operations. After starting up, their
environment is severely curtailed to provide them with a new home directory
(underneath the generic "alumnus" home directory), in which are contained
their private .newsrc, .plan, and mail files.
We wish to allow mail to arrive for these individuals in separate mail files
under these special not-quite-home directories. What we have done for the
time being is to have a really ugly hack known to the system. Specifically,
any mail arriving for an alumnus user must somewhere in the note contain a
line of the form
Alum: <alumnus users' pseudologin names, separated by blanks>
Then our /usr/lib/aliases contains a piped alias for destination "alumnus,"
and this alias is actually a rather grotesque csh script which greps for the
"Alum:" line, and parses out the alumni names. Thereafter, it distributes
the note to its assorted recipients.
What I would like to know is: Is there some more standard way of going about
the problem of distributing mail which is intended ("officially," anyway)
for one login name to more than one person/file? This hack that we have does
work, but it's crufty to say the least, and I'd appreciate suggestions for
ways to improve our situation.
Thanx much in advance.
--
Karl Kleinpaste @ Bell Labs, Columbus 614/860-5107 +==-> cbrma!kk
@ Ohio State University 614/422-0915 osu-eddie!karlggr@cord.UUCP (Guy Riddle) (02/10/85)
Since you are running sendmail, the easiest thing to do is give each person a different "username" which will be the mail address (it need not be in /etc/passwd) and then include each of these usernames in /usr/lib/aliases pointing at different files, e.g. user1: /usr/alumnus/mail/user1 user2: /usr/alumnus/mail/user2 ... and sendmail will then directly deliver incoming mail to these files. === Guy Riddle == AT&T Bell Laboratories, New Jersey ===