bob@kahala.soest.hawaii.edu (Bob Cunningham) (10/10/90)
Having created several hundred aliases for local users here of the form: firstinitial.lastname, I'm now in need of a program that deals with those that are ambiguous. In particular, I'm looking for a program that will send email back to the sender to the effect: a.smith is ambiguous, please use one of: andy_smith anne_smith But I don't particularly want to re-invent this wheel? Does anyone out there have such a routine--suitable for Unix systems--that they could kindly send me source for? I'd like to be able to have amgiguous aliases route to that program like: a.smith: "|/usr/local/bin/amgiguous" and have the resulting program check a exception list. thanks in advance, Bob Cunningham (b.cunningham@soest.hawaii.edu) -- Bob Cunningham School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology, University of Hawaii bob@kahala.soest.hawaii.edu
bob@kahala.soest.hawaii.edu (Bob Cunningham) (10/20/90)
Since several people asked me to let them know what I found out...
The short answer is that I didn't find exactly what I was asking
for: a quick and dirty way of resolving ambiguous email aliases
of the form firstinitial.lastname.
However, I received info on several packages that do that--and more.
The Andrew Message Delivery System (part of the Andrew software
on the X.V11R4 tape) provides a setup to send mail to any common
name @some.domain, plus various other features.
The "White Pages" (available from several places, primarily CMU, I think),
provides an query service with OSI-type email addresses, but appears
to need a lot of overhead, and doesn't mix well with sendmail.
The "qi" system (anonymous ftp from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu, though you have
to dig for it) along with IDA sendmail provides what looks like a
fairly low-overhead phonebook service ("qi", on one machine manages it,
"ph" client program queries over the net), and "fuzzy address"
delivery via the "phquery" program.
Since we're also administering a School on-line phonebook (using
rudimentary tools, including a simple lookup program called "pb"),
I'll probably cut over to qi/ph/phquery.
Still...for some installations (we have some remote sites, including
some shipboard networks), I'm still looking for (or thinking about
creating) a program that will take an alias of the form:
some.name "|/usr/local/ambiguous"
and pipe it through a simple program that checks a simple little file
of ambiguous names, generates a list of possibles, parses the "From:"
address of the original message, and sends a message back to the
originator telling them the different possible interpretations.
Bob Cunningham
School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology, University of Hawaii
bob@kahala.soest.hawaii.edu
--
Bob Cunningham
School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology, University of Hawaii
bob@kahala.soest.hawaii.edu