Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!itd.nrl.navy.mil!mullen From: mullen@itd.nrl.navy.mil (Preston Mullen) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Seeking advice on establishing a LARGE centralized mail system Message-ID: <8905032136.AA01329@mpm.itd.nrl.navy.mil> Date: 3 May 89 21:36:27 GMT References: <45423@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 29 The Andrew Message System at Carnegie-Mellon University has a component called "White Pages" that employs a fuzzy name recognition mechanism. According to the author, Craig Everhart , it "matches name variants to people's names reasonably well without any pre-identification of the possible variants of everybody's names." (By the way, the + in his address is a flag that bypasses the smart name recognition.) The Andrew Message System is built on top of the Andrew File System, but the White Pages name recognition component is easy to separate out. When I asked about this in October, I was told that the software is owned by IBM and that the licensing policy had not yet been determined. I had hoped (and still hope) to use this kind of name matching in a general approach like that recently suggested by in his message to tcp-ip of Mon, 1 May 89 13:28:20 EDT. One might want to set things up so that an address with exactly one match on the wrong component (e.g., first name only) would result in a response similar to the one sent for ambiguous names; in such a case, it might be better to force the sender to confirm the intended addressee than to deliver to the wrong person. Preston Mullen Laboratory for the Study of Human-Computer Interaction (Code 5530) Naval Research Laboratory Washington DC 20375 P.S. There is probably a better mailing list than tcp-ip for this topic, but which one?