The Elm Alias System Users Guide

This document is intended as a supplement to the Elm Users Guide and is only of interest to those users desiring more knowledge about how aliases work and how to create strange and exciting aliases for their systems (okay, so maybe it's not that exciting!)

This document is broken up into the following sections; user aliases, group aliases, system aliases, editing and installing new aliases, general warnings and other chit-chat.

The simplest type of aliases in the Elm system are individual user aliases. These are made up of three parts;

	aliasname list  =  username  =  address

Username is used to indicate the full real name of the user. For example, if you had an alias for taylor to get to me, the username field would contain Dave Taylor or perhaps Dave Taylor at HP or some other permutation. The name can optionally be entered in the format of Taylor; Dave. When this is done, the alias system can sort aliases on a last name basis for presentation on the alias menu within Elm. Elm uses this information to add the user's full name to the addresses of outbound mail to get more readable addresses. No matter which format a name is entered, Elm displays it and puts it in mail headers the way you would expect (i.e., Dave Taylor).

Address is either the user's full electronic mail address or, if your system uses a smart mailer, the minimum address needed to specify the destination. For example, say my smart mailer contained information on how to get to machine hp-sdd and I wanted to have an address for my friend Ken there -- I could have his address specified as simply ken@hp-sdd (or alternatively hp-sdd!ken since the two are functionally equivalent).

Let's get on to some examples, shall we?

Consider this excerpt from my own .elm/aliases.text file;

# Mail aliases for Dave Taylor
# Friends from UCSD
addie	= Addie Silva	= addie@hp-sdd.SDD.HP.COM
frank,minjarez	= Frank Minjarez	= Minjarez.Verify@dockmaster.ddn.mil
pizzini	= Ken Pizzini	= hplabs!ucbvax!ucdavis!pai!ken
george	= Burdell; George P., Famous GT Guy	= gburdell@matd.gatech.edu

For the most part, the notational format is transparent within the alias file -- the only time it does make a difference is if you have to specify more than the machine that the user is receiving mail on (as in the third example above).

Suffice to say that if you must specify any sort of uucp route that you should use the uucp notation as much as possible to ensure that the system expands the correct machine name. Similarly, if you're bouncing mail through different Internet sites (to get to a foreign system, as in the example below) you should use the notation that system expects, e.g.:
          listserv%byuadmin.BITNET@rugters.edu

After the confusion of user aliases, group aliases are even more fun! For the most part the notation is very similar:

          aliasname list   =   groupname   =   address list

The interesting part is the address list field; this field is actually in the same notation as the aliasname list (i.e., a list of addresses separated by commas), so it's really quite easy to create. It's best to illustrate by example:

friends, mypals = The Gang of Six = joe, larry, mary, joanna,
                                    nancy, michael

At times it may be desirable to send a message to everyone in the group except one or two people. This can be accomplished by adding the individuals' actual IDs to the To: list, preceded by a minus sign (-). For example, if you were having a surprise party for nancy from the above group and you wanted to discuss the details with the others, you could mail the message to:

friends -nancy

System aliases are functionally equivalent to the individual Elm alias lists each Elm user has (both user aliases and group aliases) but are read only for everyone but the Elm administrator. The format of the file is identical to the users' files, and the only difference is that this file is expected to be located in the directory that contains the system_hash_file and system_data_file files (see the Elm Configuration Guide for more details on these variables).

Simply create the system alias file in the specified directory as you would a normal alias file, and install it using the newalias command with the -g option (see the following section for more details on that). Voila!!

To install new aliases, you need merely to create, or modify, the file $HOME/.elm/aliases.text until you're satisfied with it and it meets the requirements discussed above. You can then try to install it with the command:
          $ newalias which either reports the number of aliases installed or the errors encountered trying to parse and store the given alias list.

Note that blank lines are no problem and that comments are not only allowed but actually encouraged, and must have # as the first character of each comment line.

Probably the biggest question you have in your mind right now is But how the heck does this relate to my existing Berkeley Mail aliases and the lower-level sendmail alias system? Well, rest assured that if you really want to have your aliases down in the transport you can. No problem.

And for those ex-Berkeley Mail fans, you can translate your aliases into the format that Elm wants by running them through the awk script listed in the appendix.

Finally, if you have any problems or questions, try looking in the newalias manual entry. Appendix One
An awk Script for Translating Aliases
from a Berkeley Mail .mailrc File
to an Elm .elm/aliases.text File

BEGIN { print "# Elm .elm/aliases.text file, from a .mailrc file..."
	print ""
	}
next_line == 1 {
	next_line = 0;
	group = ""
	for (i = 1; i <= NF; i++) {
	  if (i == NF && $i == "\\") sep = ""
	  else                       sep = ", "
	  if ($i == "\\") {
	    group = sprintf("%s,", group)
	    next_line = 1;
	  }
	  else if (length(group) > 0)
	    group = sprintf("%s%s%s", group, sep, $i);
	  else
	    group = $i;
	  }
	  print "\t" group
	}
$1 ~ /[Aa]lias | [Gg]roup/ {
	if ( NF == 3)
	  print $2 " = user alias = " $3;
	else {
	  group = ""
	  for (i = 3; i <= NF; i++) {
	    if (i == NF && $i == "\\") sep = ""
	    else        sep = ", "
	    if ($i == "\\") {
	      group = sprintf("%s,", group)
	      next_line = 1;
	    }
	    else if (length(group) > 0)
	      group = sprintf("%s%s%s", group, sep, $i);
	    else
	      group = $i;
	    }
	    print $2 " = group alias = " group;
	  }
	}