On Sat, 12 Sep 1998 23:55:06 -0400, Roger Fajman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>One thing that would benefit both the email and web interfaces that as
>far as I know L-Soft isn't planning is a way to feed LISTSERV
>information about the equivalence of email addresses.

This feature has been available in the 1.8d beta since approx Feb 1998.
(and no we do not yet have a final release date for 1.8d but the latest 09/98
build includes a lot of new things.)

From the forthcoming 1.8d Release Notes:

******************************************************
* Synonymous hostname registration via ALIASES NAMES *
******************************************************

LISTSERV has supported hostname aliases since BITNET added support for this
function in 1990. You could define that BITNET node (say) VTVM1 was the same
as VPIVM1 and VPIVM2 (old names) and was also known as VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU. Since
this was designed into the first major rewrite of LISTSERV, it is very
efficient and there is almost no performance penalty. It also works globally,
i.e., once the equivalence is defined, it works for all lists and all users.

However, the Internet did not have a similar mechanism for registering
aliases, so this function was only useful to BITNET sites, although the
underlying code would also have worked with Internet aliases if there had been
a way to register them.

LISTSERV 1.8d introduces support for a centralized list (called ALIASES NAMES)
of synonymous Internet hostnames. The main purpose is to address problems with
ISPs where the "From:" line is rewritten from (say) "[log in to unmask]", which is
what Joe wanted, to "[log in to unmask]", "[log in to unmask]",
"[log in to unmask]" and so forth, where "alpha", "beta" and so on are known
machine names (with the understanding that they may add machines from time to
time) and "joe" is the same in all cases. In this way it is possible for
LISTSERV to match [log in to unmask] with his actual subscribed address of
[log in to unmask] or any of the other cluster hosts in his domain.

This can also handle a situation where an ISP changed name and for instance
"[log in to unmask]" is rewritten to "[log in to unmask]". However this does not
handle "[log in to unmask]" -> "[log in to unmask]" and the like.