mail on the Spring and mailing lists

If you have an account on the Spring you need to set up a .forward file in your user directory. If you haven't done it, set up a .forward file if you don't pick up your mail here. And here's how: cat > .forward <----- notice the period before forward yourname@spring.com <----- the email address to forward to ^D <----- press CONTROL and D to end the file now exit the account and send a test message to your account, then check your own email address for that message. A better form is this (I'm using the example of my account): My .forward file: \terry,terry@www.spring.com For example, Amy's email is amylou@bluemarble.net and hers would be: \amy,amylous@bluemarble.net

* very important * If you notice mail is down on the Spring and you have root access, *please* run the following command to restart it. It works, I just did it. /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q30m This starts the sendmail daemon. This command is included in the system boot scripts, I believe, but it's too drastic to restart the whole system just to get mail going. Does anyone know how to set up mail aliases? Look at the aliases file. I like to set up a couple for our two email groups in the austen conference. Glad mail is running. I didn't find out about out till 12 hours after it went down on spring.com. Amy you have an account as 'amy' on spring.com and we need to get the others set up there also. Who will volunteer to set up these accounts (as Amy is busy the next few days).

Terry, Do I use the newalias program for this? I'll be glad to do it.

I'm not sure. Read the man page on alias if there is one. We found someone to help with realaudio. Can you work with him?

I have set up two aliases: austen_com and austen_unix. They contain the email addresses of the two Austen Conference groups. They have not been tested.

Have you tested them yet?

Have you tested them yet? Yes and they don't work. When I have a minute, I'll try to figure out why.

Tahnks!!! (I can't get to a machine with speakers here at work).

OK. I've created two mail ailiases: austen_com and austen_unix. These expeand to the mail lists on Amy's comittee page. These work with ELM but not with the mail command. Which is exactly what the man page on newalias said, if I'd been paying attention. What next?

We now have access to our mailing list thanks to Dave. Roughly a third of the email addresses are false because users didn't replace the default they were assigned with their real email addresses. This is a problem that Dave is addressing in the next release of Yapp. From the yapp conference yesterday: Topic 44 of 45: 'Austen conference at Spring' Response 3 of 4: Henry (churchyh@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu) Tue, Jan 28, 1997 (11:39) 5 lines A lot of the e-mail addresses for web users at our site are bogus, because the default choice that's presented to them is the concatenation of: The user name they're choosing to be known as here + "@" + the result of running reverse DNS lookup on the IP address they're coming in from There probably isn't any better way to construct such a default, but unfortunately an e-mail address constructed according to this procedure will be bogus in many cases, and a lot of people don't bother to edit the default... So the result is that there's a lot of bogus pseudo-addresses of the general type "MickJagger@dial-in-ppp42-9.custmax.ms.uu.net", or whatever... Response 4 of 4: Dave Thaler (thaler@armidale.ann-arbor.mi.us) Tue, Jan 28, 1997 (19:20) 18 lines This is the purpose of the "Participants" button which should be at the top of the page of the list of topics in the conference. By default, this shows the login, last time on, and full name (but not email address) of the participant. A host can change this by putting a command in the conference rc file which redefines the "partmsg" variable to look like anything you want. For example, def partmsg '%10v %o %20u %{email}' will show the login, last time on, full name, and email address. If you just want a list of email addresses of conference members yourself, you could generate this in Unix and save it to a file from in Yapp with: def partmsg '%{email}' participants > filename -Dave