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From: grahamd@otc.otca.oz.AU (Graham Dumpleton)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: System wide AMS alias file
Message-ID: <4Zo_g7K6bk8nE=ZEhA@otc.otca.oz>
Date: 7 Feb 90 23:11:03 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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We are running AMS on our system but since only a limited number of
users have any sort of workstation running X only a few are actually
using the messages program. Because of this I have set the
AMS_UsersHandleFormatting to 'no', meaning that whenever anyone sends a
message with formatting to someone in the local domain they are asked if
they wish to send with formatting etc. Now I can make things better by
using the $forceformat option in individuals .AMS_aliases files so that
if they do send formatted mail to Andrew users then they don't get asked
about formatting etc. The problem with this is that each person has
their own list of who is currently using Andrew, meaning that if someone
else starts using Andrew it has to be added to each individuals aliases
file. My question is, can I have a system wide AMS aliases file which I
can put $forceformat lines in for each user using Andrew, and then have
this included in individuals aliases files using and include statement
or for messages to check it directly. I have looked in various help
files but didn't find anything which helped to answer this.

Also we are having trouble getting people to use AMS, currently they use
the MH mail system and a number of users are worried about the fact that
once mail is read into AMS its name gets munged and its not easy to get
it back out into MH. I know about cui and that it could be used as a
replacement for MH on tty terminals but it is no where near as easier to
use as MH or vmail which runs on top of MH. Is there a way which AMS can
look at the same files as MH, not munge names and use its files for
keeping track of which items have been read etc. 

Graham Dumpleton (grahamd@otc.otca.oz.au)