Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bu-cs!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bsu-cs!cfchiesa From: cfchiesa@bsu-cs.UUCP (Christopher Chiesa) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Re: Logical Mail Forwarding? Summary: Sounds like you're thinking of a "file server". Message-ID: <3172@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: 22 May 88 21:51:33 GMT References: <283@unocss.UUCP> Distribution: na Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 38 In article <283@unocss.UUCP>, dent@unocss.UUCP (David B. Caplinger) writes: > > Without actually setting up an account called (for example) "HELP", > is it possible to set up some kind of logical or something to have any > incoming mail addressed to "HELP" (even from bitnet, arpanet, etc) > to be forwarded to a specific person, (for example) "MANAGER"? Wow. You're trying to combine a couple of different things in a way that I don't think Mail (or even VMS at present) let you do. From the sound of it, you want to be able to set something so that mail ad- dressed BY ANY USER (or any external source) to HELP, would automatically be redirected to MANAGER or whatever. The problem is that in VMS mail the redirection of INCOMING mail is handled by the RECIPIENT, using the SET FORWARD command, on an individual basis. If the username referred to doesn't exist, this never has a chance to happen because there's no recipient to have done a SET FORWARD. On the other hand, I can set a logical name in MY VMS process such that *I* can send mail to "A" but have it actually go to "B" as a result of logical- name translation. This, however, applies to OUTGOING mail, is only effective for messages I SEND while the defined logical is in effect, and cannot be used for forwarding. (Technical reason: the forwarding address for each mail user is stored in the system-level VMSMAIL.DAT (or whatever it's called) file, whereas the logical names are NOT.) Judging from the setup of the VMS mail software, you'd have to intercept messages somewhere BETWEEN parsing the sender's "destination" field, and trying to look up the recipient's "forwarding address" field. I.e., you would have to get into the Mail software itself and grab the destination address, then alter it, stick it back in, and let Mail continue. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if the hooks for this are there; how else can Bitnet access be added "after the fact" the way it was done here just recently?! -- UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!cfchiesa cfchiesa@bsu-cs.UUCP