More E-Mail Information

Mail Aliases

If you have friends who you often send mail to, but you have trouble remembering their e-mail address or simply don't want to type it in every time you send mail, mail aliases may make things easier for you.

If you are using an alternate mail reading program, it probably has it's own way to set up mail aliases. However, if you are sending mail using the regular mail program, this technique will work.

Suppose you have a friend who's e-mail address is: 

friend@really.long.machine.name
To set up an alias, you will need to add to the file ~/.mailrc. The line that you add will look like this: 
alias friend friend@really.long.machine.name
The line begins with the word alias and is followed by the name you want to use and then the full name. The easiest way to put this in to your ~/.mailrc file is to use an editor such as vi, emacs, or pico. Alternatively, you can give this command: 
echo 'alias friend friend@really.long.machine.name' >>! ~/.mailrc
The syntax in this command is very important. All this command does is to append the alias line to your ~/.mailrc file.

From now on, you can send mail to friend and wherever friend appears in your mail headers, it will be expanded to the full address you gave.

Another use of aliases is to set up personal mailing lists. For example, say you have a group of friends who play Poker every week. You could set up an alias like this: 

alias poker tom dick harry
Then, you will have an alias named poker that goes out to everybody listed on that line.

Mailing Lists

One convenient use of e-mail is mailing lists on the Internet. Theses are lists organized for various interest groups which you can subscribe to in order participate in discussion on a wide variety of topics.

A list of these mailing lists is posted fairly regularly to the news.lists newsgroup and is archived here. A WWW version is also available here.

There are certain conventions for the way that mailing lists are organized on the Internet. Suppose you've found a mailing list that looks interesting called foobar-discuss@ocf.berkeley.edu. If you send mail to the address foobar-discuss@ocf.berkeley.edu, then it will go to everybody receiving on the mailing list. This is appropriate if you have a question or other piece of mail directed to the people on the list. However, this is not where you should send mail if you want to be added to or removed from the mailing list.

The convention is that those sorts of requests are sent to foobar-discuss-request@ocf.berkeley.edu. That is, the name of the mailing list with -request appended. This will go to the person administrating the mailing list or to a program that automatically handles such requests.

To subscribe to a mailing list, you simply send a message to the -request address with a subject and/or body containing the word subscribe and your name. To remove yourself from a mailing list, send a similar message but with the word unsubscribe. Again, make sure to send these messages to the -request address and not to the mailing list itself.

The etiquette expected on mailing lists is similar to the etiquette expected on Usenet. That is, many mailing lists have questions that come up frequently. Before sending a question to a mailing list, you should find out if a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list is available and read it, in case your question already comes up frequently and you can get the answer from the FAQ.

It is also a good idea to read the list for at least a few days before sending a message to the list to get an idea whether your question is appropriate material for the list.

Last modified: July 1, 1994 -- www@ocf.berkeley.edu