Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wugate!wubios!phil
From: phil@wubios.wustl.edu (J. Philip Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: System aliases
Message-ID: <509@wubios.wustl.edu>
Date: 11 Jul 89 02:43:33 GMT
Reply-To: phil@wubios.UUCP (J. Philip Miller)
Organization: Washington University (St. Louis)
Lines: 20

we ran into a "administration" problem, rather than a bug, and wonder how
others have solved it.  In our public alias file, we have a list for all of
the users of the system, so notices can be made to everyone, etc.  Because elm
requies that these group lists be composed of only aliases, we also defined an
alias for each user and we used their first name for that alias.

The problem occurs if an individual user has an alias defined for that same
name, the then group list goes to the wrong person, e.g. I as a user may have
an alias for john that is defined as johna@elsewhere, where the system alias
file has john defined as john@myhost.  Now these are not only different
accounts, they may be different folk.

Have we set things up wrong?

How do others avoid this type of namespace problem?
-- 
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J. Philip Miller - Div of Biostat - Washington Univ Medical School
phil@wubios.WUstl.edu - Internet        phil@wubios.wustl - bitnet
(314) 362-3617                   c90562jm@wuvmd - alternate bitnet