Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!ginosko!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ctrsol!sdsu!bionet!ames!pacbell!pbhyf!rob
From: rob@PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Save mail in folder with 'alias' name -- Potential New ELM Feature ?
Keywords: elm, alias, mail, folder
Message-ID: <6226@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Date: 12 Oct 89 15:04:38 GMT
References: <627@duteca.UUCP> <1686@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl>
Reply-To: rob@PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Lines: 43

In article <1686@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl> edwin@praxis.cs.ruu.nl (Edwin Kremer) writes:
+In article <627@duteca.UUCP> alex@dutirt1.tudelft.nl (Alexander Vonk) writes:
+
+ > Just an idea:
+ > I receive or send mail to my friend Matthijs a lot. His address is specified
+ > as alias 'matthijs', because his mail address is 'b35@dhdurz1.bitnet' and
+ > that's to much to remember for me. When I want to save this mail using
+ > ELM 2.2 PL11 the default save folder pops up as '=b35', while I want to
+ > save this mail in archive '=matthijs'.
+ > Is it possible to specify default save folders in an aliases-like way,
+ > like usage of the aliases database to come up with a more user friendly
+ > name than the userid in the mail address itself?
+
+Of course it's not an easy step to change this, because Elm needs to
+*recognize* email addresses to find the corresponding alias name. If
+the mail headers in a message from "Joe Blue" to me *always* contain
+the *same* 'From:' line, it seems to be just pattern matching on the
+aliases, but that's not always the case.

This is true, and also the fact that not all messages have a From: line,
nor do all messages from the same person always have the same return
address (even if originated from the same logname & host, if your system
does not use internet addressing). 

+If we want to tackle this, I guess we should add an "also-known-as"
+field to the alias file. This extra field consists of one or more
+alternate email adresses.

This won't work. There is a one-to-many relationship between aliases
and addresses. You can't take an address and be guaranteed to get
a single alias record with a matching address.

An additional hitch is that this feature would also have to work for
(1) saved copies of outbound messages (whether or not you used an
alias availble for the address used) and (2) the 's' and 'C' commands
for saving and copying a message to another folder.

A more complex solution would be needed to implement this enhancement.
-- 
Rob Bernardo      ...![backbone]!pacbell!pbhyf!rob -or- rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM
  Product engineer, UNIX/C Reusable Code Library        Editor, "Go `C' UNIX"
  Office: (415) 823-2417                Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, California
  Residence: (415) 827-4301                     R BAR JB, Concord, California