tmoore@coss.Dayton.NCR.COM (Tom Moore) (11/07/90)
I have been working with mmdf and have come up with a few questions that someone else must have had before me (I hope). So rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I figured I would ask the net. Question One: We use an addressing scheme of "First.Last@Location" such as my address "Tom.Moore@Dayton.NCR.COM". Our current mail router (based on smail) routes to the proper NCR domain and the router there uses an external program to look up the local part of the address "First.Last" and returns an address of "user@host". This is then looked up in the pathalias database to get a route "host!user" and uux is called to deliver the mail. If the name provided is not valid, the mail is returned to the sender along with a list of possible names that they may have intended to send to. The problem I have is how to do the address translation from "First.last" to "user@host" with mmdf? A simple table lookup does not appear to be practical since for the name "Thomas J. (Tom) Moore", all of the following are valid permutations of the name: Thomas.J.Moore Thomas.Moore Tom.J.Moore Tom.Moore Many names have even more possibilities than this. Plus I need the loose matching capability of the existing program to generate the list of possible intended addresses. Since the program already exists to do the lookup, what I really seem to need is for mmdf to ask it to validate the local part of the address and use that for any further processing. I also need to include the error output of the program in the return mail to the sender to assist them in choosing the proper address. Is there a way to do this? Question Two: It seems that when using the uucp channel, uux is invoked for each address in the address list. When sending to a list of addresses that all have the same initial host in the uucp route this is very wasteful. A better arrangement is to invoke uux once for each group of addresses with a common initial host in the route. Has anyone written a uucp channel program to do this? -- * Tom Moore NCR Corporation PCD-6 (513) 445-1373 * * Consulting Analyst 1700 S. Patterson Blvd. VOICEplus 622-1373 * * Network Applications Dayton, OH 45479 Tom.Moore@Dayton.NCR.COM *