MATH DEPT Computer News, Volume 26

How to trim an e-mail alias

The faculty e-mail alias has a lot more people on it than you might imagine. (To find out who is actually on the faculty e-mail alias list, type

ldaplist -l aliases faculty

at a UNIX prompt, and then cat the file that you see near the bottom of the output. If that doesn't work, try

ldapsearch -x -b ou=aliases,dc=math,dc=purdue,dc=edu cn=faculty

to find the file.)

I know who is on the faculty alias, and I almost always want to e-mail to a subset of that august body. To do that, I simply copy and paste that part of the faculty alias I want to e-mail to the file that contains my e-mail aliases.

For example, if I use elm, I might add the lines

wiseguys = The over 50 crowd = ram,becker,brkld,lgb,catlin,
  cowen,branges,hgd,douglas,drasin,agabriel,gottlieb,heinzer,
  jjp,jspw,lempert,lipman,lipshitz,ttm,neug,rcp,shahidi,
  tong,smw,weits,wilker,ecz

to my aliases.text file which resides in the .elm subdirectory of my home directory. Notice that space at the first postition of the continuation lines. (I rarely add myself to an alias to which I may or may not be an actual member.)

Note: After you add a new alias to your .elm/aliases.text file, you will need to run the newalias command for it to take hold.

If I use pine, I would add the lines

wiseguys     The over 50 crowd      (ram,becker,brkld,lgb,catlin,
   cowen,branges,hgd,douglas,drasin,agabriel,gottlieb,heinzer,
   jjp,jspw,lempert,lipman,lipshitz,ttm,neug,rcp,shahidi,
   tong,smw,weits,wilker,ecz)

to my file .addressbook which resides in my home directory. Those are TABs between the wiseguys alias name and "The over 50 crowd" comment and between "The over 50 crowd" and the comma separated address list, which is enclosed by parantheses. The continuation lines must begin with a blank space.

If I use the old standard mail command (which I really shouldn't), I would add one big long line like this

wiseguys ram becker brkld lgb catlin cowen branges hgd douglas drasin agabriel gottlieb heinzer jjp jspw lempert lipman lipshitz ttm neug rcp shahidi tong smw weits wilker ecz

to my .mailrc file in my home directory. Notice that the commas have been replaced by spaces, and it is all one line. You could add the comment line

# The over 50 crowd

right after this list line. (Comments must begin with the # character at the first position in the .mailrc)

Other tidbits about e-mail aliases and unix groups.

If you log onto the machine newton, you can find all the current departmental e-mail aliases in the file /etc/aliases

To find out what unix groups the user bell (that's me) belongs to, type

groups bell

To find out who belongs to the office unix group, type

ypmatch office group

That's all for now.

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