) (05/07/89)
The Computing Services Office at the University of Illinois at Urbana is
in the process of creating a university-wide mailing system. The system
is comprised of three pieces. The largest is the white-pages system
created by Steve Dorner of CSO. It's based on the CSnet central name
server (qi - Query Interpreter). Each student and staff member is assigned
a unique alias. The user is allowed to change the issued alias provided
it remains unique. Associated with this alias is the user's preferred
email address, office address, home address, phone numbers, etc. Everything
that is in the paper phone book is also in the qi database.
The user client is a program called ph. It searches on the unique alias
and can fuzzy match on names. Providing ancillary information such as
department or curriculum narrows the search.
The second piece is the 5.61+IDA sendmail release. The ida/cf/Sendmail.mc
has been very slightly modified to invoke a new mailer, phquery, whenever
an address resolves to <name>@uiuc.edu. This is configured with the
DOMAINMASTER option.
Phquery is the third piece. It examines its arguments and calls qi to
determine the preferred email address for the supplied name. At this point,
name can be only the unique qi alias. This restriction will soon be lifted
to allow phquery to resolve full names (e.g., paul-pomes@uiuc.edu ->
paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu), and amateur radio callsigns (e.g., ka9wgn@uiuc.edu ->
phil@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu). In the case of ambiguous matches, phquery will
return a list of possibilities that includes department and/or curriculum
information that should allow the sender to make the next attempt successful.
Future enhancements include automated printing and campus mailing of
messages to those users w.o. email addresses.
Source for the qi (central server) and ph (user client) can be obtained
via anon-FTP from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu:/net/{ph,qi}. The phquery code,
when ready, will be included in the /mail/sendmail/uiuc directory.
Sorry, we cannot email this code as it is much too large. Chocolate chip
cookies with a postpaid tape will work wonders though.
Paul Pomes
UUCP: {att,iuvax,uunet}!uiucuxc!paul ICBM: 40 06 47 N / 88 13 35 W
Internet, BITNET: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu Phone: 217 359 0881
US Mail: UofIllinois, CSO, 1304 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL 61801-2987