Hi,
This thread, from the Pine discussion list, has a connection
with the Application/Signature thread. Should this new application
be discussed in the ietf-types list instead of here?
We also have a program to convert between RICE mailer notebooks and the
Pine addressbook. The author is Tom Remmers.
(remmers(_at_)u(_dot_)washington(_dot_)edu(_dot_))
...
Rick Troth <troth(_at_)rice(_dot_)edu>, Rice University, Information
Systems
Thanks Rick, we are using successfully your tools. However, we wonder
if there is also a tool for VM's "names" conversion.
CMS NAMES and CMS NAMEFIND, yes indeed! We "really really"
need a tool on UNIX like CMS' NAMES and NAMEFIND utilities. Hmmm...
this should also cross into the SMTP/822/MIME discussion where Greg
Vandreuil's Application/Signature has been getting kicked around.
I'll do that in a separate posting to follow that thread's subject line.
Here's my App/Sig which comes to you from my NAMES file:
Name: Rick Troth, RUA
Email: troth(_at_)rice(_dot_)edu
Telephone:
Fax:
Address: 11558 Withers Way Circle;Houston, TX 770xx
Portrait:
Don't have my portrait in there yet. :-( Soon though.
And there's no phone or FAX at the new house. There are also other
fields that App/Sig defines. Anyway, the point of this is that
NAMES gives me a general purpose flat-file plain-text user-maintainable
database for this kind of information.
My supervisor in a previous life once created a UNIX 'names'
program. It kept the database in $HOME/.names. (file is called
<userid> NAMES in the CMS implementation) I don't think it was
ever integrated, though. Surely would be nice, though, if such a
generic tool were available and used by at least *one* application.
I believe others would follow ... if the tool were simple enough
while still reliable. RiceMAIL uses CMS NAMES because it's there,
it's easy to use, interfacing with it is trivial.
The format of a CMS NAMES file is:
:tag.data :tag.data :tag.data ...
where the tag ":nick." is sacred and delimits entries.
The tags can be anything you like. The CMS NAMES program defines
the following fields:
Nickname, Userid, Node (historical that node is separate),
Notebook (where to log mail for this person),
Name, Phone, and Address (surface mail, that is),
and "List of Names" which is a group alias definition.
Usually, though, I don't even use NAMES. I just edit the
file by hand. It's too easy. The NAMEFIND tool is invoked by
any application that wants to extract data from this database.
I think I wrote a crefty tool once to read NAMES format on UNIX.
It's been a *long* time, though. And since I haven't gotten around to
writing my own mail user agent ]snicker( I haven't had an occasion to
actually *use* the generic tool.
--
\Oved
I'm really glad you mentioned NAMES. Let's see it happen!
--
Rick Troth <troth(_at_)rice(_dot_)edu>, Rice University, Information Systems