SKELTON@VAX1.LSE.AC.UK (12/11/87)
> We found an interesting little 'feature' of VMS Mail yesterday: > User "AAA" had his mail forwarded (using SET FORWARD) to user > "BBB". Well, last week we removed user AAA from the SYSUAF file, > only to discover we could still send mail to AAA, and it > did in fact end up in BBB's mailbox. Presuming > this is because running AUTHORIZE to remove a user does *not* > update the VMSMAIL.DAT file, we would like to know if someone can > suggest a procedure which will get our VMSMAIL.DAT file in > synch with our current SYSUAF file. I wonder how many 'ghost' > usernames are still receiving mail this way? I have seen a couple of replies to this; one missed the point by supplying a procedure to remove VMSMAIL entries that had NO forwarding address ( the reverse of what was asked ) and the other suggested using MAILUAF.COM to go through all registered users ( not a quick job with 2000 students around ). My favoured method is to use the MAIL command SHOW FORWARD/USER=* which lists out all users who have set a forwarding address. On our site there are few of these, and most are genuine. ( In fact most do not correspond to SYSUAF records anyway and have been added with SET FORWARD/USER=xxx yyy ). It shouldn't take much effort to check the few oddities to see if they are still in the UAF. Also, our de-registering procedure removes VMSMAIL.DAT records automatically, as well as disk quotas and entries in at least three other files used locally for system management and registration. I don't recommend anyone with more than a few tens of users to make much use of AUTHORIZE interactively - its a pity that DEC haven't yet provided tools to combine management of all these files in one go. Jeremy Skelton, London School of Economics