wbrown@loft386.uucp (Wayne Brown) (05/31/90)
Fred van Kempen has asked me to post documentation for the umail.cf file from
his UMAIL program. The following is based on my experiences with the program
and has been determined by experimentation, reading the source code, comments,
etc.
The configuration file (umail.cf) is used to tell UMAIL the things it needs
to know in order to create headers for your mail and to route outgoing mail
properly. It is divided into several sections. (Comments may be inserted
anywhere, in any section, by prefixing them with #.) The first section is
for items that appear in the mail header and is pretty much self-explanatory.
Here you give the name of your organization, your system-name, domain, etc.
One that may be a little confusing is the TimeZone field. You should enter
the abbreviation for the name of your timezone, followed by the number of
hours of difference between your local time and GMT. The hours field should
be prefixed with a - if you are west of Greenwich or a + if you are east of
it. For example, Central Daylight Time would be expressed as CDT -0500.
Also in this first section are several flags you can set to indicate whether
certain optional fields should be included in the header. In most cases
these should be set to TRUE. The Escape flag should also be TRUE if you can
forward otherwise undeliverable mail to a smarter host for further routing.
The next section is called NAMES and is simply a list of all the names by
which other systems may refer to your system. At the very least it should
have an entry for the system name and the system name plus domain. If you do
not have an official domain name, use .uucp. For example:
ledgepc.uucp
ledgepc
After this comes the HOSTS section. Here you should list all systems which
are in your L.sys file. The following entry
loft386 := TRUE , $$ , "@"
says that we know how to talk to a system called loft386, that it is a "smart"
host that can handle Internet-style domain addressing, that we should use UMAIL
to handle the mail delivery, and that there are no more arguments to specify.
If you wish to call another mail program to do the actual delivery, give its
pathname in place of "$$" and any arguments needed in place of "@". This field
would normally be set up as in the example above. If the host can't handle
anything except "bang" paths, the second field should be set to FALSE.
The final section is called DOMAINS and is used to specify where mail for any
particular domain should be sent. It is specified in the form
domain := host , route
where "host" is the name of a system in the HOSTS section and "route" is the
path to be used to reach the domain from that host. Assume that you wish to
send mail to john@johns_sys.far_out.com, that this domain can be reached through
bills_sys!jacks_sys!freds_sys, and that you have an entry for bills_sys in
your HOSTS section. The proper entry in the DOMAINS section would be:
far_out.com := bills_sys , "jacks_sys!freds_sys"
Now you can address mail to john@johns_sys.far_out.com and it will be sent to
jacks_sys!freds_sys!johns_sys.far_out.com!john. If bills_sys is smart enough
to figure out the route by itself, you can replace the route field with "@".
In addition to actual domains, you may also list system names of hosts that you
wish to access through a particular path. For instance, I normally send mail
destined for the uucp domain to loft386.uucp. However, to reach atweyco.uucp,
I need to go through rtweyco.uucp instead of loft386. Thus I have these
entries in my DOMAINS section:
atweyco := rtweyco , "@"
atweyco.uucp := rtweyco , "@"
rtweyco.uucp := rtweyco , "@"
uucp := loft386 , "@"
. := loft386 , "@"
(Both rtweyco and loft386 are in my HOSTS section.) This allows me to send
mail to atweyco, atweyco.uucp, or rtweyco.uucp and it will be routed through
rtweyco, whereas anything else for the uucp domain will go through loft386.
In effect, this allows you to do the same thing for remote systems that the
NAMES section does for your local system. Incidentally, the entry that
begins with "." is the default entry; mail to any domain not specified
elsewhere in this section will be sent to the default host.
As stated earlier, these are observations based on my personal experience.
If anything in this description is misleading or downright inaccurate, that
is my fault and mine alone. Fred asked me to post this because he is too
busy to do it right now and because I had it figured out sufficiently to
be able to get mail to him. :-)
Wayne Brown |
411 E. Gaywood Ave. | UUCP: uunet!loft386!ledgepc!wayne
Columbus, MS 39702 | Internet: 72447.2645@compuserve.com
U.S.A. |