Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!dylan
From: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Support your local PostMaster (was Re: Standard site aliases . . .)
Message-ID: <1990Sep27.161652.8420@ibmpcug.co.uk>
Date: 27 Sep 90 16:16:52 GMT
References: <5376@thebes.Thalatta.COM> <1990Sep25.120211.3951@news.clarkson.edu> <5624@munnari.oz.au>
Reply-To: dylan@ibmpcug.CO.UK (Matthew Farwell)
Organization: The IBM PC User Group, UK.
Lines: 36

In article <5624@munnari.oz.au> ianr@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Ian ROWLANDS) writes:
>In article <1990Sep25.120211.3951@news.clarkson.edu> ahd@kendra.kew.com (Drew Derbyshire) writes:
>>From article <5376@thebes.Thalatta.COM>, by campbell@Thalatta.COM (Bill Campbell):
>>> Has anyone come up with a standard set of aliases such as:
>>> 	postmaster >> 	support >> 	info >> 	usenet
>>If postmaster doesn't work, call them up on the telephone and yell at
>>them.  It's NOT required on uucp sites, but is on internet sites, and
>>generally a nice practice.
>	Well you can ring me up on the phone, but it would cost a fortune!
>On my UUCP site (not the one I'm on now) I can set an alias for the above names
>to anybody I like. Funny enough, I alias them to me as it's a single-user
>machine! Anyway, what's wrong with mailing to root? At least they could
>put you onto the real person (although at my site, I could alias it to
>anybody).

I think relying on a 'usenet@foo.bar.com' is a bad idea, cos that
assumes that that person has news.  If you want to contact anyone at a
site, the ones to try are postmaster (which really should be there, but
some sites don't, either thru not knowing how to or not knowing that
they should do), then if that doesn't work try 'root' or 'system'.
'root' won't work on all sites, because not all sites are unix, believe
it or not.

The best thing is to alias all probable id's to one person.  we have
defined postmaster, postie, admin, root, system, usenet, sysadmin and
even MAILER-DAEMON.  All these are aliased to the same people.

All it takes is an extra couple of lines in the aliases file.  I don't
see why people don't do it.

Dylan.
-- 
Matthew J Farwell                 | Email: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk
The IBM PC User Group, PO Box 360,|        ...!uunet!ukc!ibmpcug!dylan
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