The EPO makes your internet address
Why EPO?
Addressing electronic mail users on various mail systems is inconvenient, cumbersome and often beyond the abilities of casual users. The mail system requires that the mail-sender know quite a lot about the recipient: Username, Hostname, Subnet name and Network name. For example, sending a message to Mark Galassi of Physics requires sending it to the electronic address rosalia@dirac.physics.sunysb.edu and would be very difficult for a typical user unless the sender knew the actual electronic mail address in advance.
Changing the machine on which a user elects to receive mail is also very difficult on the present system. Any change in the user's mail address requires that all potential senders be notified of the new address.
The implementation of EPO addresses the above mentioned issues and provides an outline for a campus-wide, centrally managed Electronic Post Office.
Addressing
Each electronic mail user is assigned a unique MailName that is derived from his or her full name (with periods replacing spaces), and in most cases is identical to it. Thus John Doe's MailName will be John.Doe and if there is more than one on campus, at least one of them will have to use a middle-initial and his MailName might be John.M.Doe
Mail systems that cannot handle a "." in the username portion of the mail address can be accommodated by using the underscore "_" character. In processing, the MailName will be case insensitive. Any addressing problems are expected to be minor and few in number and can be handled on a case by case basis.
When addressing mail from a source off- or on- campus, the universal_address will be used. It has the form of an Internet mail address and contains Stony Brook's unique domain-name sunysb.edu -- thus John Doe's universal_address will be John.Doe@sunysb.edu -- unlikely to be changed unless Mr Doe changes his name or ceases to receive electronic mail in Stony Brook.
MailBoxes
Each electronic mail user selects an address where he or she wants to receive and read mail, the MailBox. The hostname portion of the address, i.e. the part of the address after the "@" sign will be the name of a computer which the user normally accesses and that is running mailer or Mail Transfer Agent software. This can be a campus-wide resource (Lotus Notes or ALL-IN-1), a departmental resource or a single-user workstation.
The username part of the MailBox will be the person's userid (login) on that machine. If Mr Doe uses the login "jdoe" on a machine whose domain-name is zapper.sunysb.edu, and wants to receive his mail there, then his MailBox will be jdoe@zapper.sunysb.edu
The Electronic Post Office will route mail to the specified destination according to a table which maps the universal_address to a MailBox. Since mail routing will be table-driven, it will take only a change to the table to allow users to change their mailbox of choice -- without having to change their advertised universal_address. This way, once the aforementioned Mr Doe had John.Doe@sunysb.edu printed on his business card, there will not be a need for him to print new business cards just because he would prefer to receive his mail on a different machine. Assuming that initially the EPO might have routed his mail to, say, JDOE@ccmail.sunysb.edu, it will now only take a change by whoever administers the EPO to have Mr Doe's mail routed to jdoe@zapper.sunysb.edu -- and the change will be transparent to anyone attempting to send him mail.
Implementation
A Unix server residing in the Computing Center functions as the Electronic Post Office with sunysb.edu as its Internet address. The EPO has a database which has information about all participants and contains the fullname, MailName (E-mail Address), MailBox, department, campus address, and campus phone.
This information is accessible through the Directory Service (http://adam.cc.sunysb.edu/phonex.html).
The MailName of a person is normally of the form
Firstname.Lastname. Any duplication will be ordinarily resolved by
using the middle initial(M), in which case the MailName will be
Firstname.M.Lastname.
In the absence of a middle name duplications will be handled by
assigning a numeric digit. Ex:John.Davis.2