hart@blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart) (06/06/91)
Hi all! I'm using mush, and I'd like to know if anyone has any techniques or suggestions for using it to run a small mailing list echo. I think that's the proper term. Basically, I want people to be able to mail to a name (would this have to be a valid account name on my system?), then automagically send the mail back out to all the names on the list, including myself. thanx for your help. -- Michael G. Hart Internet: hart@blackjack.dt.navy.mil AOL: MikelHart Computer Specialist, 15 years of computer & mgmt experience looking for a job. Reply NOW if you have openings in DP management.
hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert) (06/07/91)
In article <telnet.676146157@blackjack> hart@blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart) writes: >I'm using mush, and I'd like to know if anyone has any techniques or >suggestions for using it to run a small mailing list echo. I think that's >the proper term. > >Basically, I want people to be able to mail to a name (would this have to >be a valid account name on my system?), then automagically send the mail >back out to all the names on the list, including myself. Since none of the usual experts have tackled this one, I will. The short answer is: You don't do this with mush, you do it by talking to your system administrators. The longer version: Assuming you are on a Unix system, somewhere there is a system-wide file or database that defines e-mail aliases. Likely places are /etc/aliases (for BSD-derived systems) and /usr/lib/aliases (for SysV- derived systems). On the machine from which I am posting this, it is in a yp database called mail.aliases (nicknamed just aliases). This database serves several purposes: The RFCs for mail say that every site should have a mail address call postmaster. The alias database defines what real person on our staff should receive the mail sent to postmaster. We assign login names on a variety in a variety of formats (mine is just my last name), but to simply communications, mail can be sent to (almost) anyone on our staff by addressing it to the concatenation of the first initial and last name. (The exceptions are primarily those cases where a last name is common enough that one of these combinations is ambiguous.) Thus, you can send mail to me either as hirchert or khirchert. An alias entry of the form khirchert:hirchert@pluto is what does that. Mail can be sent to any of the ncsa systems using this yp database, and it will be delivered on the machine chosen by the user addressed. An alias entry of the form hirchert:hirchert@pluto takes care of that. (For the observant among you, yes, I receive mail on a different machine than I receive news.) Finally, this file can be used to define collections of users receiving mail using a single alias. For example, I supervise a group of student consultants. To facilitate my communications with those students, the system administrators added an entry of the form scons::include:/soft/netfiles/maillists/scons.list and gave me ownership of the file /soft/netfiles/scons.list. Each line in that file is the e-mail address of one of my student consultants. As long as I maintain that file, mail sent to scons is routed appropriately. Assuming you can get cooperation from your system administrators to set up something similar for your purposes. If you are willing to give up on the idea that people mail to a name other than your own, you could probably set up mush scripts that would automatically locate mail with some specified property (e.g., a special flag word in the subject) and redistribute that mail to a list of other users. I'll leave the details to the people who know mush scripting much better than I do. -- Kurt W. Hirchert hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu National Center for Supercomputing Applications