🚀 go-pugleaf

richb@kronos.com (Rich Braun) writes:
>We have just added an email gateway to our site, which effectively
>increases the potential number of Internet email users by a factor of
>twenty or so.
>The trouble is, of course, most of these users don't have logins on
>the system advertised as 'kronos.com' on Internet.  If someone out in
>the World at Large tries to use finger to learn someone's email
>address here, they're probably out of luck.   ...
>Ages ago, I used a TOPS-20 program called "watson" for this purpose.
>What's out there nowadays?  In order for our users to update their own
>info, they'd have to have some sort of platform-independent interface
>(probably email) into the database.

The big thing these days is a server called 'qi' put out by the
folks at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu.  It has a client program, 'ph', which allows
users to update their own info.  I highly recommend it- but it may
not be perfect for your situation, since ph assumes Internet access
is available between client and server.

Another information server that exists solely to give e-mail address
info is Horton, which automatically builds a directory by periodic
polling of local hosts with finger, then gives access to the database
via the whois protocol (and soon the finger & qi/ph protocols, too).

You can even use a program called phquery with either Horton or qi to get 
your server's sendmail to forward mail sent to first-last@server.foo.edu 
to the proper e-mail address, whether or not the target address is
on the Internet.
- Dan Kegel (dank@blacks.jpl.nasa.gov)